While working as a contractor at Microsoft Search Labs (part of Microsoft Research, in Silicon Valley), I was in charge of the user interface design and development for project Symphony. Symphony is a platform that enables non-developers to build and deploy a new class of search driven applications that combine their data and domain expertise with content from search engines and other web services. The Symphony prototype has been built on top of Microsoft’s Live Search infrastructure. While Symphony naturally makes use of the customization capabilities exposed by Live Search, its distinguishing feature is the capability it provides to the application creator to combine their proprietary data and domain expertise with content obtained from Live Search. They can also integrate specialized data obtained from web services to enhance the richness of their applications. Finally, Symphony is targeted at non-developers and provides cloud services for the creation and deployment of applications. Symphony was presented at both the Very Large Databases (VLDB) conference in 2009, and the International Conference on Data Engineering in 2010. Click the links below to view the papers submitted to those conferences.
VLDB - Symphony: Enabling Search-Driven Applications
ICDE - Symphony: A Platform for Search-Driven Applications
The screenshots below show Symphony’s intuitive, drag-and-drop user interface. The user drags components (tools) from the toolbox onto the canvas in order to design their application. Each tool can be customized, allowing the user to create an application that is truly unique. Customizations include layout, styles (colors, borders, fonts, etc.), and data sources. These customizations help to create an application that can be placed directly into your own webpage without looking like it was designed by someone else.
In this image, the user is dragging the Internet Search tool onto the canvas. Already in the canvas, is a search box, advertising, and others.
In this image, the user has edited the styles of the Internet Search tool. This is what the user has chosen to appear for each result.
