Raza’s Weblog

PageRank Vs. BrowseRank . The algorithm wars August 12, 2008

I talked about Yahoo! revamping its search service in my previous post.Now can Microsoft be far behind ?. Well, according to Microsoft, the formula behind Googles success in the search area is their “PageRank” algorithm . The PageRank algorithm rates the relevance of a page based on the number of pages that link to it, and how many pages link to those pages so on and so forth….

Microsoft says it has come up with a better algorithm which it calls “BrowseRank” . Now instead of relying on the number of links between pages , this algorithm determines a page relevance by the actual number of hits it receives by users . So, 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. So BrowseRank brings a human touch to the assessment of a pages relevance.

Now, whether Google or Microsoft or Yahoo! will have the final word in search technology only time will tell, but so far Google no doubt leads with Yahoo! at number two and Microsoft at number three 😛

You can read more about this algo war here