Pagerank, Browserank and the search for Google's achilles heel

Its been clear for awhile that the Google Pagerank system is (i) being heavily gamed and (ii) is no longer giving the best result from its basically link volume/value based analysis. Microsoft has also spotted this, and has come up with Browserank:

Essentially, the researchers tested out a system that replaces PageRanks' link graph--a mathematical model of the hyperlinked connections of the Internet--with what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people's behavior.

"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. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users' implicit voting on page importance," the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference this week in Singapore.

Will this propel Microsoft to top spot? Who knows - the interesting thing to take away is that Microsoft (and others) are starting to take Google on with new search ideas - an encouraging trend. ASnd itsa worth remembering that all that advertising wealth still depends on search excellence.

And there is an increasing probability - as more people search for New Search - that the innovation will come from without Google, and they may not be able to buy it themselves. The way Google is structured today, search drives Ad revenue. Lose search and Ad revenue goes with it - that is Google's Achilles heel. All else in the Googleplex is still largely noise in the revenue producing sense.

One suspects therefore that strategically, Google is increasingly trying to separate the (current close) links between search excellence and Ad revenues, but we suspect that will be some time comng, and very hard for text based Ads.