Sorry, not likely.
I'm all for Microsoft and Yahoo figuring out how to become more competitive with Google search, and applaud their efforts -- as long as they do it separately. Combining the two search engines would have taken time and attention wasted on integrating existing products, rather than pursuing new ideas.
So Microsoft has announced a new algorithm in a paper titled "BrowseRank: Letting Users Vote for Page Importance."
Stephan Shankland at CNET says in his Digital Media column that "Microsoft thinks it can teach its rival a thing or two about searching the Internet."
But that's just the hyperbole journalists use in their ledes to capture attention. Kind of like describing something as a "Google Killer" in a headline.
The folks at Microsoft are fully aware that Google probably does this sort of thing already. Otherwise, why publish a paper describing how it works, allowing Google to adopt the new idea?
As Shankland notes in quoting a Google statement, "PageRank is just one of more than 200 signals we use to determine the ranking of a Web site."
But Microsoft's paper throws in a little hyperbole as well: "Experimental results show that BrowseRank can achieve better performance than existing methods, including PageRank."
The method uses browsing activity, rather than just links, to determine relevance. "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"
And where does Microsoft get that data? From "an extremely large group of users under legal agreements with them," according to the paper.
Uh huh. "Extremely large." Well, there are a lot of people using Internet Explorer. But is Microsoft going to set up legal agreements with all of them, or just use the data?
Google, by virtue of its search engine, and probably things like Google Accelerator, routing traffic through its servers, also has an extremely large set of user browsing data. And you know that google is using every bit of user behavior it can to help determine relevancy.
The Microsoft paper is probably mainly intended to get publicity, to show the world it's spending its own considerable cash doing research, and hopes to get better than Google. And in that respect, the paper is a success.
Still, it's good to see that Microsoft is indeed working on the problem. It won't be a Google killer, because Google has spent many more years researching and refining its relevancy algorithms than anyone else, and catch-up is a tough game to play. It's kind of like all those years cyclists spent trying to catch Lance Armstrong powering up a mountain in the Tour de France.
But then, a big part of Google's advantage is its positive image. There have been studies showing that other search engines give just as good results. Everybody just assumes Google is the best.
A 2006 study by Intralink is one such example. I couldn't find that study. Must be gone. But a brief article in Cheap Hosting Directory said, "The most surprising discovery was how well MSN and Google performed in exact matches."
And in that case, a little positive PR for Microsoft is not a bad thing at all. Apparently, Ballmer's speech in Seattle didn't help.