Determining searcher intent automatically

Here is an example of how useful it is to learn SEO from research papers.
If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you will know that I am a big fan of finding out what exactly search visitors want. I posted about classifying both visitors and landing pages, so that search visitors looking for information find information articles, searchers looking to take action land on transaction pages, etc.
I really like the research tools MSN Labs has. One of my favorites is this http://adlab.msn.com/OCI/OCI.aspx
You can use it to detect commercial intent. Try it. It is really nice.
I’ve been wanting to do something like that, but I didn’t have enough clues as to how to do it. Until now.
Search engines patent expert, Bill Slawsky, uncovered a gem. A research paper that details how a team of researchers achieved exactly this.
I still need to dig deep into the document and the reference material, but it is definitely an excellent find.
I will try to make a new tool for this. I will also try to make this and other scripts I write, more accessible to non-technical readers. I guess most readers don’t care much about the programming details. They just want to be able to use my tools easily 🙂