Microsoft Tries to One-up Google Page Rank

Microsoft had been ranking as the third topmost search engine being used over the Internet by most online users. Of course, Google grab the number spot while Yahoo on the second spot. Despite Microsoft’s third position, it still tries to compete with Google when it comes to page ranking over the Internet.

The Google Page Rank is an algorithm that had made Google as the rising search engine on the Internet. It helps assess the importance of every specific web page, the number of web pages link to that certain web page as well as the importance of those web pages that are linked. The academic collaborators and researchers of Microsoft had tried competing with the Google Page Rank by releasing their idea of “Browse Rank”, which is similar to the idea of Google Page Rank. The Browse Rank is said to have more human touch to the assessment of displaying results and linking of web pages.

The Browse Rank of Microsoft is said to rival with the Google Page Rank. According to its researchers, the Browse Rank had been tested out on a system whereas it replaces the link graphs of the Google Page Rank. The link graphs are the Internet’s mathematical representations of hyperlinked connections. These graphs are often called as the browsing graphs that help rank the web pages accordingly to the behavior of the online users.

Compared to Google Page Rank, the Browse Rank of Microsoft can leverage the implicit voting of the millions of users on the importance of web pages. Since the idea of the Browse Rank focuses more on the frequency of visits of the web pages by the online users whereas the longer duration periods spent by the users on particular web page, it is more likely important. This idea was even mentioned my Microsoft researchers on an article entitled “Browse Rank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance” from the SIGIR or Special Interests Group on Information Retrieval conference held in Singapore. The authors who joined the mentioned conference include Shuyuan He of Peking University, Zhiming Ma of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ying Zhang of Nankai University, Hang Li, Tie-Yan Liu, and Bin Gao of Microsoft Research Asia.

The Shortcomings of Google Page Rank

The researchers of Microsoft squabble that Google Page Rank has some number of loop holes. They believed that people can simply play the system by creating fake web sites that are called the link farms. These sites can feature hyper links that point to web pages that makes any person believed that it has the highest importance on the displayed results.

Another loop hole seen by Microsoft researchers on Google Page Rank is the issue of indexing process whereas Google does not take account of the particular sites or web pages being visited by users for a long period of time. Microsoft researchers believed that it is better to monitor the behaviors of the users in anonymous ways by web browser plug-ins and web servers.

Bringing Research to Completion

It is no doubt that Microsoft is trying to rival with the Google Page Rank. Microsoft would want to bring their research to completion and funding large group of researchers to make Browse Rank version a successful one.