User is the King!

While browsing through Yahoo! Labs, i came upon 2 projects, which actually inspired me a lot. So, this is just a brief implication what i've got from them, and use of similar feature in my Research Engine project.

• Keystone (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/59?from=project) - new generation advertising technology. Currently under Development.

The thing that really got my eye is this, "The biggest scientific challenge in contextual advertising is that compared to sponsored search or Web search, user intent is not very clear".

My Question: How on the earth are we to find the context of the user who we don't know or can't see?
Their Answer: The Keystone system works by first extracting "essence" from opportunity - understanding what the content is about and who is viewing it.

More Info: A key difference between Keystone and other contextual advertising systems is that Keystone tries to predict and model user response based on all user context, including page content, user attributes like behavioral and geographical data, referrals to the page (how the user got there), and information about the publisher page.

Read the rest here.

Another project is Motif, from Search technologies group of Yahoo! Research.

• Motif (http://labs.yahoo.com/project/176?from=project) - lets users search for Wikipedia articles with context.

Project Motif is very similar to Keystone (which is focused on advertising), in usage of context. The thing is Motif is more concerned about Query Context, than User Context. Try out the demo here, you'll know what i mean. This is relatively easy to implement and maintain.

I really like Motif for its search relevance, and like to add a similar feature to my Research Engine Search Module. Also, Keystone methodology helps me understand user context, based on which i can search the query context to further grain my results.

Got any similar kinda stuff? Please share!