Will Microsoft’s new BrowseRank be the new Pagerank?
Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment. The classic Google Pagerank uses the number of incoming links as votes. The more links your site has, then the more popular the site. Unfortunately this method is prone to linkfarms that try and game the system.
Browserank replaces this link counting with a count of user browsing activity. The more visits and longer a user stays on the page, then the more important the page is. Right now it is still in the expiremental stage with Microsoft only using volunteers. This begs the big question of what would happen if microsoft includes the Browserank tracking into a future version of internet explorer?
It would definitely be met with a lot of protest, but if it turns out to be a good indicator of website popularity, then Microsoft will have a huge advantage in the search engine results. Of course Google could release their own method and include it in the Google toolbar, but they still wouldn’t have as much reach as Microsoft and IE.
We will have to stay tuned to see where all of this is headed. Don’t worry though, the big search engines are always working on bringing you better search results.
