Ask's Edison and clickstream analysis

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land reports that Ask.com is attempting to integrate an expanded version of DirectHit's clickstream analysis technology with its Teoma relevance rank algorithm.

Barry quotes Ask VP Rahul Lahiri as saying:

It's a next generation algorithm that ... synthesizes modernized versions of Teoma and DirectHit technologies ... It's much more complicated than ... just counting clicks ... The technologies we have ... go way beyond that ... taking a deeper look at communities and calculating the authorities in those communities.

We ... [are] looking into the universe of user behavior, and what that could tell us, and the social fabric of the Web itself, and what that tells us.

It is hard to tell from this description, but it sounds like they are using clickstream data to attempt to identify good or trustworthy sites, then propagating that information through the link graph. If so, it might be similar to the ideas described in TrustRank.

It does not sound like Ask intends to use clickstream data to show different results to different people, to do personalized search, at least not in this particular project.