….is the somewhat cryptic title of a research project I have been involved in for about a year. The project is financed by the Norwegian Research Board, led by FAST Search and Transfer, has Schibsted and Accenture as business partners and six research partner institutions (UiO, UiTø, NTNU, Cornell, DCU/UCD and NSM). The purpose is to do research in advanced search technology – and to try to understand the business implications of search technology (which, as you may surmise, is what I am involved in.)

All this to introduce a new category on this blog – iAD – and to say that I will start to write down various ideas within this research project whenever I think so. Plus, anything search-related will now be labelled iAD as well.

And in case you think search is not important – Microsoft acquired FAST two weeks ago, and today offered $44.6b for Yahoo (which uses FAST technology.) Hence, search is apparently important. At least to Microsoft.

I am off to FASTForward in Orlando in two weeks, so perhaps there will be time for a little conference-blogging under this heading as well. Until then….