Microsoft using Neural Networking Ranking in Search Results

I've been curious to see when search engines were going to start exploring using neural networks for their search engine rankings. Microsoft at Searchification Day just announced that their new algorithm is able to understand the meaning between the words used in a keyword phrase:

The improved ranking algorithms use neural networking ranking that are loosely modeled from biological neural networks and can learn patterns that simple algorithms can't. These algorithms can detect things like words pairs and are close to natural language queries (for instance, "what's the hottest it's ever been in AZ"). They note that for queries like this, Google returns pages with all of these words in them, but Live can now return better results because it can understand the relationship between words. [NOTE: This new Microsoft patent on ranking found by Bill Slawski is also interesting.

This is from a Search Engine Land article.

With only 69 million searchers in a month (vs. 104 million for Yahoo and 142 million for Google), and only 11% of queries (vs. 23% for Yahoo and 56% for Google) Microsoft knew it had to do something to improve its rankings.

I'm curious to see how this will be eventually implemented in the other search engines...