Nov 03 2008
Watching Things Happen vs. Making Things Happen
Years ago when Google was already successful, I was in a coffee house with a friend. We were discussing how to beat Google and build a better search engine! We wanted to become Larry Page and Sergery Brin in Malaysia! Ambitious, huh? 
Google search result was then very much based on PageRank to calculate the “popularity” of web sites. One main factor for the “popularity” of a web site is the number and quality of links from other web sites to it. The more backlinks your web site has, the more “popular” it is, and so the higher ranking you will get in Google.
So how to outsmart Google? We thought of the possibility of ranking web sites based on their traffic. The more a web site is visited, the higher ranking it should have. We thought of calculating “popularity” based on hits, not backlinks.
But how are we going to track the traffic? We can’t get site owners to put a counter code on their sites. We also can’t access their web server logs. So finally we did nothing and dropped the idea.
But now Microsoft seems to be on similar line of thought when they proposed something called BrowseRank, which calculates popularity based on traffic and usage. The more a web site is visited and the longer period of time it is spent on by users, the higher ranking it should have in search result.
I don’t know how they could do it. But if they succeed to beat Google and become the number one search engine (which I think is not likely), I and my friend have only ourselves to blame for not further developing our idea.
I heard there are three kinds of people in this world – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who don’t know what happen! Apparently I belong to those who watch things happen!
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