The Battle of Ranks

In searches, like all things in life, rank matters. This competitive nature is the catalyst for people to want better things in life, and of course in this modern age, technology continues to outdo itself when it comes to rankings.

Speaking of online computer technology, Microsoft is a distant third at 5% as compared to search engine giant Google which has the majority of share at 70% and Yahoo with 20%. In an effort to claim back its “heyday status” of being the undisputed leader in the computer industry, Microsoft unveiled its own browsing algorithm system called BrowseRank.

BrowseRank was primarily created to enhance user searches by giving more relevant results and hopefully for Microsoft, it would eventually outdo Google's PageRank. This new algorithm system was the result of the collaboration of Microsoft's researchers and scientists from Asian universities.

So whats is the essence of BrowseRank?

1) Human Behaviour - Browserank uses human behaviour in interpreting how relevant the site is. There are millions of webusers compared to webmaters which would give a more democratic result on searches. This would also mean that site manipulation is less likely, but take note, web users can be manipulated also into going into a site by advertisement hype. So results for BrowseRank can be temporal or time bound.

2) Search Relevance - contrary to PageRank, Browserank does not take in account the number of links associated to a particular site but takes into consideration the number of times a user visits a page and how long they are actually staying on that particular page. For example, users spend a long time on social networks like Facebook but as compared to Adobe.com, it has a better PR than Facebook. Why? Because it a lot of links pointing to its site.

PageRank on the other hand have some advantages over BrowseRank mainly on economic level. Moreover, it has the ability to police links and strip site of its PR.

Both algorithm system has issues looming over it and would be better combined to create a very enhanced and relevant search result. Unless someone makes the effort to do that, the "battle of ranks" will continue.