Microsoft Launches Browse Rank To Compete With Google’s Page Rank

I like seeing Microsoft playing catch up and failing miserably, don’t you?  After all those years of dominance due to their strong-arm tactics, I enjoy seeing the Zune being the butt of jokes while the iPod continues to be a bestseller, and I also loved it when Google came in and started kicking butt on their way to taking over the world.  Except that trying to take over the world makes them more like the new Microsoft.

In the U.S., Google accounted for a massive 70% of all searches, as of July 2008, which is up another 6% from their ranking just a year earlier.  Yahoo is in second place with around 20%, and Microsoft barely squeaked by Ask.com to get third place among search engines with just a bit more than 5%.  They tried to get a bigger slice of the pie before by spending money like crazy, which they have a lot of anyway.  (If only they’d send some over to us here at Cataweb Online S.L.!)

There was their offer of cash rebates to customers who bought stuff from merchants using their “Live Search” search engine.  Then they acquired the search engine Powerset a month later, which uses a different way of comprehending searches by trying to find the full meaning of the phrases typed into it, while Google treats each word individually.  Although its usefulness is limited to searches on Wikipedia, it’s reportedly doing well on the iPhone, ironically.

And then there was their attempt to buy out Yahoo, of course.  It seems that Microsoft’s solution to a problem is to throw money at it, but in Yahoo’s case, even that wasn’t enough.  But now they’ve come up with a new strategy to be number one, and that’s actually developing something new.  In a collaborative endeavor between their own researchers and some scientists from certain Asian universities, they’ve developed BrowseRank to go up against Google’s PageRank.

PageRank is a big part of the search algorithms and tools that Google uses to find the relevant sites for your queries, and it places great weight on the number of links that are connected to a site from other sites.  BrowseRank, on the other hand, is supposed to calculate how often users visit a certain site and for how long they stay there.

Sounds more relevant than counting links, doesn’t it?  Only time will tell though if this really does provide a user with the most reliable results to his search engine queries.  Microsoft likes to banner their opinion that this engine puts the power of searching into the hands of internet users, and not web developers, who are the ones who are best equipped to put your site into the top rankings of a search right now.  This could be an upheaval of SEO techniques in the works, if it turns out Microsoft’s got the superior product.

But then it’s been a long time since they’ve had something like that so maybe Google and current SEO practitioners like us here at Cataweb Online S.L. and others have no reason to worry.