Microsoft Challenges Google's PageRank Technology

Google's PageRank Web site-ranking method is being challenged by Microsoft. Microsoft's new tool, BrowseRank, aims to add a human factor to the site-ranking process. Microsoft claims PageRank does not take into account frequency and staying time of Web site visits, while BrowseRank monitors user behavior data to calculate page importance.

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."