Microsoft Makes it Easier to Stalk People on the Web with EntityCube

Posted 12/07/2009 at 6:31pm | by Ryan Whitwam

0

Comments

Print

If you thought Google had the market cornered on enabling online stalking, think again. Microsoft has come out with yet another new service. This time it’s a new biographical search engine called EntityCube. It is a project out of Microsoft’s research labs that aims to give more people their own wiki-style page.

With a bit of Googling (or, rather Binging?) you do get you a lot of information about a person, but it requires culling results by hand. EntityCube just wants to centralize that. It also throws in a few intriguing features including a "Quanxi map" that tries to provide a visual overview of people's connections to one another. "Even if a search engine could find all the relevant Web pages about an entity, the user would need to sift through all the pages to get a complete view of the entity," says the Microsoft page describing the project.

While in the future this service cold be extended to a great many people, it’s currently most useful for those that already have some public profile. Perhaps people with only a small Wikipedia article or “stub” will benefit most from EntityCube for now. Check it out and let us know what you think.