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Microsoft introduced a new idea this week to rival its competitors, Google and Yahoo, in the search arena. It aims to achieve success in online search, through human intervention in the search formula rather then a completely automated one, like Google’s PageRank which can be gamed around with easily.
According to CNET
"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. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance," the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore. Authors are Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, and Hang Li from Microsoft Research Asia and Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shuyuan He of Peking University.
Although Microsoft is at a distant number 3 position as a search market leader, it has been trying to catch up with Google using various tactics such as Cashback. Now it’s betting on its own research and shortcomings in Google’s PageRank to gain market share and provide better performance and search results. Although the researchers have admitted that PageRank is useful and such algorithms could be added into a larger formula for determining which sites come out on top of the search results. Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank…in important page finding, spam page fighting, and relevance ranking.
The Microsoft researchers argue that PageRank has a number of problems. For one thing, people can game the system by building bogus Web sites called link farms. Those sites feature hyperlinks point to a Web page whose importance a person wants to inflate so it appears higher in search results. Another PageRank issue is that the indexing process doesn’t take into account the time a user spends on a particular site.
But user behavior, monitored in anonymous form by Web servers and Web browser plug-ins, can be better, the authors argue.
Yahoo has also been trying to innovate on the search front with BOSS, SearchMonkey and Glue Pages, although we haven’t seen any rise in market share for Yahoo despite its efforts.
This doesn’t mean that Google isn’t prepared for any fight for search market share, as they also invest heavily in their research. Their biggest research team is dedicated to search and the company updated its search formula more than 100 times in the second quarter. And with storage measured in petabytes and thousands of machines, they have a huge infrastructure at its disposal.
Another concept copying from Microsoft, cant Microsoft them self get some thing innovative rather copying popular concept. “SIGH”