Microsoft working on loading the Bing database on your phone for faster searches

Mary Jo Foley from the ZDNet All about Microsoft blog has uncovered a Microsoft Research project aimed at providing faster searches on your smartphone while on the go.

Microsoft  SONGO is “a mobile search and advertisement cache architecture for mobile devices,” according to the cached Bing site.

From a white paper synopsis about SONGO that’s on the MSR site:

“Initially, a community-based search cache is generated by mining the most popular queries and links from the mobile search logs. This cache is updated daily making sure that the latest popular information is always available locally on the mobile device. Over time, the community-based cache is incrementally updated with the queries and links that the individual user submits and visits respectively. An analysis of 200 million queries shows that, on average, 66% of the search queries submitted by an individual user can be locally served by caching 2,500 links at the expense of 1MB of flash and 200KB of RAM space. A prototype implementation of SONGO in Windows Mobile demonstrates that a cache hit results into 16x faster responses and 23x energy savings when compared to querying through the 3G link.”

In short, a relevant segment of the Bing database will be stored locally, providing super-fast searches in about 2/3 of cases.

Microsoft has so far developed two prototype apps include one providing FaceBook real-time-search, and another “Quick Ads” demo app which shows off real-time business look-ups.

Read more at ZDNet here.