December 2, 2008

RankNet and fRank as an indicator of search future

by Brian Turner

Marios Alexandrou takes a look at an older Microsoft fpaper and compares it to PageRank, but what I find interesting in the reading is human user indicators Google could already have in play.

* Popularity as measured by the number of times it was visited by users over time via the toolbar
* Anchor text length and number of unique words in that text
* Page elements such as number of words in the body and the frequency of the most common term.
* PageRank as computed on 5 billion pages.
* Domain-level elements such as the number of outlinks on any page and the average PageRank.

From my own observations, I think Google has been pushing on more varied anchor text since the summer,.

However, I also think it’s clear with the development of Google Knol and the recent customisation of search results under a Google Account that Google are desperate to add as much human user data to their overall set and tap into it.

While discussions on fRank are probably going to be fairly academic, it remains interesting because you can be assured that Google have already considered – and even implemented – a number of the discussion options.

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Story link: RankNet and fRank as an indicator of search future

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