Microsoft Unveils BrowseRank, Google Feels a Draft - Too Good to be True?
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So far we've examined the shortcomings of PageRank and how BrowseRank intends to solve them, but experts have a few concerns with BrowseRank as well. Here is an excerpt from the proposal I mentioned in the last section:
Some websites like adobe.com are ranked very high by PageRank. One reason is that adobe.com has millions of inlinks for Acrobat Reader and Flash Player downloads. However, web users do not really visit such websites very frequently and they should not be regarded more important than the websites on which users spend much more time (like myspace.com and facebook.com).
On the surface, this seems to be very encouraging for BrowseRank. It would definitely give more control to web users and more credence to their concept of a more democratic web ranking system when juxtaposed with PageRank's “links as votes” notion. But are social media sites really the most important sources for relevant information? Most of their content is irrelevant to the majority of web users.
And unless Microsoft blends their search results somehow (consider how Google mixes Google News with its organic results), sites like Digg could be manipulated to make temporary information more important than it should be. They could then wait longer to see whether spikes in traffic are sustained. There's also the fact that some low quality pages are good at answering really common questions. Until search engines get better at answering these questions and previewing pages in their results, this will remain an issue.
Aaron Wall of Seobook.com says PageRank does have an advantage in the way people tend to link to informational resources. Since Google's search results are geared toward informational sites, searchers are then more likely to click on paid ads during a commercial search. Wall says, “Google also has the ability to arbitrarily police links and/or strip PageRank scores to 0 with the intent to fearmonger and add opportunity cost to anyone who gathers enough links pointing at a (non-corporate owned) commercial domain.”
Of course, with issues looming over both PageRank and BrowseRank, there's always the possibility that Microsoft and Google squash their competition and combine both algorithms into a larger formula, right? “It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance," the researchers said in their proposal. "We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work.” Oh well, it looks like the competition will go on until someone cries mercy.
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