Microsoft Research SRC Toolbar is a tool for searching web with the Search Result Clustering (SRC) technique, which is developed at Web Search and Mining Group in Microsoft Research, Asia. It on-the-fly clusters a certain search engine´s search results into different groups, and provide meaningful and readable names for these groups. SRC changes the traditional representation of search results into a non-linear way, so as to facilitate user´s browsing.

Traditional clustering techniques don´t work for this problem because the documents are short, the cluster names should be readable and the algorithm should be efficient for on-the-fly calculation. This method takes the whole problem in another way and overcome the difficulties in traditional clustering method. Basically, it tries to first identify salient topics by identifying distinct and independent keyword, and then classify the search results into these topics.