Microsoft plans to use the Powerset technology to make sure results descriptions match the pages they reference. One shortcut that might be immediately helpful would be to compare the relevancy of the site's home page description with the description of the deep page and use the site's description if it is a better match or generally much more coherent.
I personally like Google's deep descriptions which show the chunks of text my keywords appear in. But it would be interesting to learn how many users find that helpful, and what trade-offs might make sense for certain types of queries and users. Perhaps the intentions of some searchers would be better served by using the webmaster's page description, or the first paragraph of the page. Power users might enjoy having the ability to change the type of description they get by default. With a dynamic technology such as AJAX, any user could easily toggle between descriptions such as "where my keywords appear" and "first paragraph".
Search UI
4-July-2008
Results Descriptions and Powerset
As this site develops, much of the discussion will be about radically changed search interfaces that will take search through the dramatic leap that windowing operating systems represented for the OS world. However, there are also considerable opportunities to fine-tune the standard 'search box/results list' interface used for most web searches. One of the areas which could use some work is the capsule page descriptions which appear in search results. Microsoft recently acquired natural language search firm Powerset, and noted that improving results descriptions is one of the major reasons for the acquisition: http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/archive/2008/07/01/powerset-joins-live-search.aspx.
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