Microsoft researchers, in cooperation with several Asian universities, recently introduced a new browsing algorithm that according to the company is set to challenge and eventually overpower Google’s PageRank. BrowseRank is the newest attempt by Microsoft to overthrow Google as the top-ranked engine in the search industry, within which Microsoft places a dismal third.

As of June this year, Google leads the pack of search engines with an astonishing 70% share of all searches in the United States. It is followed distantly by Yahoo with 20% and MSN with only a 5.5% share.

Microsoft, however, is not taking all this sitting down especially given that the company is not used to dismal rankings ever since it started. Previous attempts of the company to take the lead in the search engine industry include offering cash incentives to consumers who used Live Search and its recent failed attempt to buy Yahoo. With the development of BrowseRank, however, Microsoft is taking the competition head-on instead of allowing its money to do the talking. Whether it will succeed this time is yet to be seen.

PageRank and BrowseRank side by side

The main difference between Google’s PageRank and Microsoft’s BrowseRank lies in how the two algorithms calculate a web page’s relevance. Where PageRank uses the web’s link graph to determine the importance or relevance of a page, BrowseRank arrives at its rankings based on the number of times a user visit a particular website and how long the said visit was.

According to Microsoft’s proposal, BrowseRank gives the control over a page’s relevancy back to Internet users. This, it says, eventually leads to a more democratic Internet where relevance is not controlled by web developers. The researchers pointed out that webmasters can go around PageRank’s algorithm by employing loads of hyperlinks in a website and by creating a link farm.

Another problem they identified with PageRank is that it disregards the duration of time that net users spend on particular web page as they randomly follow links. Microsoft believes this amount of time to be a crucial factor in ascribing page relevance. “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,”

However, even as BrowseRank appears to solve several issues associated with PageRank, experts also have several concerns about it. BrowseRank, with its focus on user behavior, ranks social networking websites like myspace.com with high importance. To this, experts ask if such social media websites have relevant information to offer to majority of Internet users.

Google and Microsoft together?

Microsoft’s proposal contained an interesting clause where researchers said, “It is also possible to combine link graph and user behavior data to compute page importance. We will not discuss more about this possibility in this paper, and simply leave it as future work.”