Microsoft Unveils BrowseRank, Google Feels a Draft - BrowseRank to the Rescue
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The people at Microsoft naturally think that PageRank has a number of issues that need to be solved. In their proposal, they mention that webmasters can manipulate the system by adding a large number of hyperlinks and creating what's called a link farm. These pages are solely designed to inflate the importance of the sites to which they link so that they appear higher in the SERPs. This method is a favorite of web spammers because it greatly distorts a link analysis algorithm's ability to calculate page importance.
Another problem with PageRank is that it does not take into account the amount of time a person spends on a web page while they are randomly clicking links. Microsoft feels this is a crucial factor in determining page importance. “The more visits of 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 researchers said. They propose using a more dependable data source, called the user browsing graph, and a more powerful mathematical model.
The user browsing graph utilizes user behavior data obtained from web servers, which collect it from Internet browsers. The data includes the URL, the method of arriving at the URL (hyperlink, input in browser, or bookmark), and the time spent on the page. A graph is then built where “vertices represent web pages and directed edges represent real transitions between web pages by users.” Please see the figure below for clarification. Note that the time isn't included in the graph portion of the image, but will be included in actual processing.
As far as developing the BrowseRank algorithm, the main difference between it and PageRank is that BrowseRank implements a continuous-time Markov process and PageRank uses a discrete-time Markov process (a.k.a. a Markov chain). I also suggest reading the proposal I linked to at the beginning of this section for a more thorough discussion. I'm afraid this subject matter is not only beyond the scope of this article, but beyond my capacity to comprehend.
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