InternetMicrosoft Challenges Google's PageRank Technology (NewsFactor)

NewsFactor - Microsoft engineers, in collaboration with researchers at several Asian institutions, have proposed a new method for improving upon the Web page rankings produced by today's search engine requests. Called BrowseRank, the new approach adds a human factor to the process by weighing how people actually use the Internet, the collaborators reported in a paper recently presented before the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval.

Microsoft engineers, in collaboration with researchers at several Asian institutions, have proposed a new method for improving upon the Web page rankings produced by today's search engine requests. Called BrowseRank, the new approach adds a human factor to the process by weighing how people actually use the Internet, the collaborators reported in a paper recently presented before the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. "The more visits [to] 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," the paper's authors noted. The goal is to "leverage hundreds of millions of users' 'implicit voting' on page importance," they said, "in accordance with the concept of Web 2.0." Missing the Mark Google's trademarked PageRank method measures the relative importance of Web pages through the use of a sequence of data-processing instructions -- called a link analysis algorithm -- that assigns a numerical weighting to each element within any given set of hyperlinked documents. "Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results," Google said. "We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the... [ Read more on www.yahoo.com ]

InternetMicrosoft's Answer To Google's PageRank Algorithm: Less Privacy? (TechWeb)

TechWeb - InformationWeek - BrowseRank, Microsoft claims, can deliver better search results by measuring user behavior, including where users go and the amount of time they remain at those pages.

InternetItaly prepares to charge Google execs: sources (Reuters)

Reuters - Italian prosecutors are preparing to file charges against four current or former Google Inc executives over a 2006 video on the Internet provider's Italian-language site, court sources said on Friday.