The Microsoft Research campus, spread across five large buildings, has two new MSN Search related projects under development, “Wild Thing,” and “Nocturnal.”

The first is nicknamed “Wild Thing” enables short hand searching, TMP sources stated:

“Microsoft originally devised Wild Thing for mobile users, so they wouldn’t have to enter so many characters on a cell phone keypad, but the company decided to make it available for everyone after seeing how useful it was.

For example, if someone found it difficult to spell the last name of California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, entering “ar* sc*w” into the query box or cell phone will find him. An entry of “ar* sc*w mo*” will find films from the former Terminator, as you can see the +mo* = movies query :).

Secondly, “Nocturnal”, a “viral” social type of MSN search companion tagging project; the technology taps into a user’s bookmarks and previously visited pages to share them with friends in the MSN Messenger buddy list. Lidong Zhou explains:

Nocturnal has two components. The first is found in MSN Messenger Live beta, which has a shared information folder. Drop whatever you want to share in it and that information is shared with friends on your MSN buddies list. You can tell MSN Messenger not to share anything, share with only a few people, or with everyone. The second part is a toolbar for the Web browser that lets you rate pages and capture links in your shared folder, allowing them to be shared with other people.

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