Existing search engines often return a long list of search results, ranked by their relevancies to the given query. Web users have to go through the list and examine the titles and short description sequentially to
identify their required results. This is a time consuming task when multiple sub-topics of the given query are mixed together. For example, when a user submits query "resume" into Google and wants to get search results related to "resume writing", he should go to the 10th, 11th, 32nd and 71st results. A possible solution to this problem is to cluster search.Search Engines such as Vivisimo, Mooter, Exalead (beta), IBoogie, and Clusty provide Web Search Results clustering.

The following tools, including a new tool from Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), provide new web search result clustering functionality:

TopGist Cluster Tool - http://www.topgist.com/
Dowser Cluster Tool - http://dowser.sourceforge.net/
MSRA Search Results Clustering - http://wsm.directtaps.net/default.aspx

[Via John Kane's Blog]

Nini is the uncommonly powerful .NET configuration library. The goal of this project is to provide developers with a tool that makes it easy to write highly configurable applications in a short amount of time.

Features

• Multiple Configuration Types 
  INI, XML, Registry, and command line
• Strong Variable Types
  String, int, float, etc. Eliminates casts
• Set and Save
  Add, remove, edit, and save configs
• Lightweight and Fast
  Small footprint, built for speed
• Merging
  Merge several configs into one
• Open Source
  Free for all purposes (full source code)

This service gives you the ability to sign up for free alerts when your blog is updated. It uses the Microsoft Alerts service, which lets you receive messages through your MSN Messenger, e-mail, or your mobile device. MessageCast offers this for free for any blog.

[Via ISerializable]

What features should be ABSOLUTELY present in a browser to make that browser your default browser ?? Is it tabbed browsing? it is full control over BHOs? it is the best security and control available in a browser? is it fancy UI? is it the ability for the browser to conform to the specification to the very last, minute little detail? Is it a combination of these mentioned features? Is it something else?

In other words, what are the things that you want most in IE or want IE to improve?

Step-by-step instructions:

• run your web or news search on the MSN Search Beta
• add the text ‘&format=rss’ to the url.
• copy the full url into your RSS Reader.

Here is a sample web search url:
http://beta.search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=tsunami+relief&format=rss

Here is a sample news search url:
http://beta.search.msn.com/news/results.aspx?q=tsunami+relief&format=rss

[Via msnsearch's WebLog ]