Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank from News.com reports on a research paper from Microsoft named “BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance (PDF).

The paper describes the downside of Google’s PageRank algorithm and describes how Microsoft’s “BrowseRank” algorithm fills in the holes. BrowseRank uses browsing behavior, such as analyzing a user’s web browsing history for relational data, to add into the mix. In addition, the paper describes that they look at how long a user stayed on a particular page. They believe BrowseRank is much more reliable in “inferring page importance” than PageRank and TrustRank algorithms. Stephan at News.com does a nice job summarizing the research paper, which you can find more of at this page.

Related Topics: Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz