News.com has an overview of work on Implicit Query and other advanced search and UI techniques at Microsoft Research. This work is lead by Sue Dumais, ex- of Bellcore's Latent Semantic Indexing group, and really smart (and nice) person. Don't go looking for all this stuff in the next Windows release, necessarily. Microsoft has a long history of banging away in the search engine space without getting much out the door. Best wishes to Sue, but the road from research to product in this area seems to be a long and winding one.
10:52:37 AM    

The wannabe monopolists intent on controlling the technology you use, and suppressing your rights to talk about it, are making another power grab through political influence buying. This time, it's musician-wannabe Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Disney), sponsoring something called the EnForce Act, which is actually an anti-trust exemption for our beloved oligopolists. Can you think of good policy reason that these guys should have a special case carved out of an act that seems designed to control exactly their behavior? Me neither. A good time to drop e-mail on your Senators - maybe there are a few with guts left out there.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who also suggests a RICO investigation.
9:30:50 AM