October 16, 2008 by Matt Thomas
In a move that Microsoft executives would have you believe marks a sea change in the war for domination of the search engine market, everyone’s favourite multinational technology giant has released an algorithm which, it claims, will prove to be the main competitor with, and eventually usurper of Google’s PageRank. Imaginatively they’ve called it BrowseRank.
Its central difference is that instead of measuring links to pages and links from pages, it keeps track of how many users visit a site and for how long, ranking accordingly. It is thought that this will give control of the internet back to the users, rather than the developers.
This return to at least attempting innovation is a refreshing move for a company which has recently been obsessed with flexing its financial rather than creative muscle. Case in point, the brazen attempt to effectively buy users from Google by offering prizes and cash rebates to Live Search users and the attempted outright purchase of competitor Yahoo, who are actually outperforming Microsoft at present.
The move is an attempt to claw back market share, from a company unaccustomed to being in third place (behind Yahoo and, of course, Google). The last time I checked, Google was responsible for 70% of all US searches. For my money, that’s simply because they offer the best results.
If Microsoft want to challenge, they need to be better than them. Time will tell if BrowseRank can deliver.
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