Microsoft plans to unveil new search technologies at the SIGIR conference in Seattle this week, an annual meeting of industry and academic experts in the field of information retrieval and search. Altogether the company's researchers are contributing 17.5 percent of all papers accepted at the conference, the single largest contributor.

The new technologies cover analysis of click-through patterns and browsing behaviors. In turn, these are added to search engine algorithms and can make the searches more relevant. Additionally, the technologies would help in the detection of so-called "click spam," say researchers.

Researcher Eugene Agichtein said most search engines display results in "two dimensions," that being matching the user query with the content of link structure of a page. However, Agichtein and other Microsoft researchers think adding a human element could improve Web searching.

"We're looking at how to add a third dimension - the users themselves - to improve the search experience," he said. By examining click-through and browsing patterns across a large number of users, we are able to learn a great deal about how people interact with search technologies and can thereby improve our accuracy dramatically."

The work in the paper titled "Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior" just scratches the surface of what the Redmond company plans to present.

Research in some of the other twelve papers to be covered at the conference include the areas of feedback relevance, cross-language retrieval, query analysis and classification, summarization, personalization, graph structure analysis, and the development of new machine learning algorithms for search.

Ten of the papers were co-authored with the help of researchers at academic institutions. Microsoft has a long history with the SIGIR conference, being active in the group for the past nine years.

"Microsoft's involvement in the SIGIR and the search communities is extensive," SIGIR conference chairman Efthimis Efthimiadis said in a statement. "I believe the work Microsoft Research is doing is advancing the field of search, and it will improve the online experience for all users."