
Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank - markbao
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-9999038-93.html
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simoncoggins
I've often thought this approach makes sense and wondered why it didn't seem
more common.

The two challenges are gathering the information and interpreting it. Logging
which links are clicked is obviously easy but not necessarily a good indicator
of interest (for instance I'll often Ctrl-Click a number of links then read
them rather than click one at a time until I find what I want).

It sounds like they are using a representative sample of users with a plug in
to allow them to collect more advanced information (such as time spent) which
is an interesting approach.

I can imagine that there may be false positives though - for instance a site
that looks like it should contain the desired information (but actually
doesn't) might occupy users for longer than a page with the answer they want
right at the top.

~~~
13ren
PageRank (based on publishers' idea of relevance, though linking) can yield
false positives, too. But, I guess someone who goes to the trouble of
publishing a document will have a more considered opinion than readers of that
document.

BrowserRank is a bit like Web 2.0 PageRank, in that it operates on user
voting. It would be nice if you could nominate _whose_ reading habits you
would contribute to the ranking you see. Maybe a new job title could be
"browser leader", where you sell your browsing data, if you are _really good_
at wasting time. Average that over a million browser leaders, and you have an
interesting dataset for Ranking.

The other problem is scale (as someone said). Modeling a web of documents is
hard enough; modeling all the readers of those documents is a lot more data -
but certainly possible to go some way towards it. Hardware gets cheaper and
cheaper, but web adoption will saturate soonish, so we'll get there.

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mojuba
It's not hard to imagine the SEO "engineering" taking an all-new direction:
trying to keep visitors as long as possible on a given web page. Terrible
times ahead. Unless, of course, Microsoft's idea fails like everything else
they undertake on the Internet.

~~~
ricree
This seems like the sort of thing that botnets would excel at. Instead of just
a link farm, unscrupulous companies could have a whole bunch of machines
"clicking" away within their link farms to make it look like there is actually
user traffic.

~~~
josefresco
It's called the 'circle of life', or the circle of poo depending on your
preference.

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gscott
I see the following problems:

1\. Most people find websites through Google. MS wants to measure what
websites people are going to, well that is going to be influenced by pagerank.

2\. It will be like alexa where there sample data just covers some users and
not a great cross section of Internet users. Unless if MS builds this into the
browser, which would cause a firestorm of protest.

3\. Pagerank uses obvious indicators of value which BrowseRank seems more like
the Yahoo home page where the top seaches box give you links to Jessica Alba
pictures, the Batman movie, etc. Driven by popular culture.

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ntoshev
It is very reasonable to assume Google already includes such data in search
since they bought Urchin / Google Analytics.

~~~
mlinsey
Probably true, but it's good to see MS being open about their research, since
google often isn't.

~~~
13ren
I'd be very surprised if Microsoft did not apply for a patent on this before
disclosing it.

~~~
mlinsey
Then I guess we'd better hope that ntoshev was right!

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mixmax
I did a startup that went under in 2001 that did exactly what the article is
talking about. It's all about timing I guess.

~~~
aneesh
Search is also a game of scale. And Microsoft has billions to throw at
building this. C'est la vie, I guess.

~~~
mixmax
Exactly - these were the two main problems we faced. I learned a lot and had
fun doing it though.

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cia_plant
Seems a bit silly to compare spam page avoidance between PageRank and
BrowseRank, when all the spam pages have been specifically targetted to get a
high PageRank.

