Microsoft using Neural Networking Ranking in Search Results

I've been curious to see when search engines were going to start exploring using neural networks for their search engine rankings. Microsoft at Searchification Day just announced that their new algorithm is able to understand the meaning between the words used in a keyword phrase:

The improved ranking algorithms use neural networking ranking that are loosely modeled from biological neural networks and can learn patterns that simple algorithms can't. These algorithms can detect things like words pairs and are close to natural language queries (for instance, "what's the hottest it's ever been in AZ"). They note that for queries like this, Google returns pages with all of these words in them, but Live can now return better results because it can understand the relationship between words. [NOTE: This new Microsoft patent on ranking found by Bill Slawski is also interesting.

This is from a Search Engine Land article.

With only 69 million searchers in a month (vs. 104 million for Yahoo and 142 million for Google), and only 11% of queries (vs. 23% for Yahoo and 56% for Google) Microsoft knew it had to do something to improve its rankings.

I'm curious to see how this will be eventually implemented in the other search engines...

Does Offline Advertising Drive Online Searches?

Jupiter Research and iProspect have released the results of a fascinating study about how people use search engines. The whole study can be found here.

The interesting part for me, however is the chart showing which offline advertising/marketing medium influences people the most to go online and use a search engine to find the product/service they were just exposed to via traditional marketing/media channels:

Offline channels clearly influence a significant percentage of online search users....to subsequently perform queries on search engines based on the company name, product or service name, or slogan that appears in the messaging of that offline channel.
...Television and word of mouth are the two most frequent offline drivers of search, ...both of these channels influence over one-third of online search users to perform a search.
Even more surprising is that a full 67% of online search users are driven to search as a result of some offline channel.

We'd all be well served to keep in mind that folks are responding to our advertising and marketing by going online, so that ads and collateral should promiently list your website's URL.