Calendar
Network
Feeds
- 59
- Sphinn It!
Went Hot: July 26, 2008 - 9:36 am
Posted By: soulfood 345 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://news.cnet.com)
Category: SEO
Although I am not in alignment that Google doesn't use any user behavior data as the article implies.
7 Comments
Comments
If user behavior is such a great indicator of importance, why do Microsoft's search results suck so bad?
The FAROO P2P Search Engine has been doing this for some time already.
FAROO's "If users spend a long time on a page, visit it often, put it to bookmarks or print it out, this page goes up in ranking."
sounds very familiar to Microsoft's
"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." doesn't it?
A very significant difference is though, that FAROO maintains the privacy of the user because it calculates the PeerRank in a decentralized manner, while Microsoft would collect all click streams of all users in a central server.
It's great to see that Microsoft research paper confirms that attention based ranking is able to outperform PageRank both for relevancy and for spam suppression.
Just another haven for spammers!
I read the BrowseRank paper yesterday, and I was very annoyed by it. I have read dozens of academic research papers about PageRank, TrustRank, IR, Machine Learning, etc., and this BrowseRank paper was the first one I've read that seemed to be deliberately critical of PageRank. Maybe I was just biased because I knew this work came from researchers at Microsoft, but I could've sworn that this paper had some "Microsoft is better than Google" undertones. Did anyone else catch that?
In any case... the BrowseRank algorithm is a joke, in my opinion. I think this whole idea was flawed, the moment these researchers made the assumption that users spend more time on important pages. Even if BrowseRank DID outperform PageRank in ranking documents (which I think is debatable), there is a mountain of problems it would have to overcome, before it could be implemented.
First of all... it requires users to opt-in to browser tracking features, which I can't imagine being available on anything other than I.E.
Second of all... it rewards pages that keep users the longest! The researchers who wrote this paper kept mentioning how easy it is to manipulate links to inflate PageRank, but what about BrowseRank's potential for abuse? How about these for some new SEO best-practices:
I don't know... BrowseRank just seems like yet another failed attempt to be better than PageRank. I mean honestly... the BrowseRank algorithm chose MySpace as the single most important site on the Web? I'm sorry, but I just can't accept the idea of web page importance being influenced by 100 million teenagers with too much time on their hands.
"...seemed to be deliberately critical of PageRank." & "..."Microsoft is better than Google" undertones. Did anyone else catch that?"
Absolutely - unbelievably transparent too. I'm seeing more and more of that from Microsoft - like Steven Ball today saying that Yahoo wasn't a factor anymore - it's a two horse race (meaning Microsoft & Google).. to me the ignorant arrogance is actually kinda funny.
"...it requires users to opt-in to browser tracking features, which I can't imagine being available on anything other than I.E."
Yet another example of Microsofts sense of self importance out ranking their sense of self preservation
"..I just can't accept the idea of web page importance being influenced by 100 million teenagers with too much time on their hands."
MySpace, the single most important piece of cyberspace real estate..? C'mon Microsoft, get your head in the game.
67% of searches performed. Yahoo! Search (20%), MSN Search (5.25%) and Ask.com (4%)
(hitwise)
with 5.25% who cares?
browserank, what an ugly name. Couldn't they have been a bit more original?