TipAdept Dot Com

Microsoft engineers, in collaboration with researchers at several Asian institutions, have proposed a new method for improving upon the Web page rankings produced by today's search engine requests. Called BrowseRank, the new approach adds a human factor to the process by weighing how people actually use the Internet, the collaborators reported in a paper recently presented before the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.

"The more visits [to] the page made by the users, and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important," the paper's authors noted. The goal is to "leverage hundreds of millions of users' 'implicit voting' on page importance," they said, "in accordance with the concept of Web 2.0."

Missing the Mark

Google's trademarked PageRank method measures the relative importance of Web pages through the use of a sequence of data-processing instructions -- called a link analysis algorithm -- that assigns a numerical weighting to each element within any given set of hyperlinked documents.

"Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results," Google said. "We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Gauging the relevance of Internet searches is extremely important to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft because it allows the search engine leaders to more precisely target their placement of ads on behalf of clients. But Microsoft and its collaborators claim that PageRank misses the mark because it allows the importance of pages to become artificially inflated.

For example, Web sites such as Adobe.com are ranked very high by PageRank because Adobe.com has millions of sites linking to it for Acrobat...