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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."

PageRank : Google's trademarked PageRank method measures the relative importance of Web pages through the use of a sequence of data-processing instructions -- called a link analysis algorithm -- that assigns a numerical weighting to each element within any given set of hyperlinked documents.

"Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results," Google said. "We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the Web to determine a page's importance."

Browserank : Microsoft and its academic collaborators say their new method is superior because it is based on a user-browsing graph that is generated from data that reflects actual human behavior. "User-behavior data can be recorded by Internet browsers at Web clients and collected at a Web server," they said.

BrowseRank's user-browsing graph can more precisely represent the Web surfer's random walk process, and thus is more useful for calculating page importance, the collaborators claim. Furthermore, the amount of time spent on the pages by users is also included under the BrowseRank method.

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