Yahoo Is At It Again

[espmartin]

The Yahoo search engine is going to be taking on Google to try and gain top
spot, and they're saying that their new algorithm will meets or exceed the
quality of Google's.

Here's some points from an article I found on this:

What Yahoo plans to do:

• Measure link weight – influenced by the frequency with which users follow a link
• Note when links are ignored and users leave (teleport) to another page of their choosing
• Calculate the probability that a user stops and reads a webpage rather than views it and moves on.
• Incorporate user data into the algorithm – "User Sensitive PageRank could reflect "the navigational behavior of the user population with regard to documents, pages, sites, and domains visited, and links selected."
• Personalize PageRank based on demographic information – age, gender, income, user location)
• Emphasize recent information
• Weigh anchor text more heavily – the patent filing calls anchor text "one of the most useful features used in ranking retrieved Web search results

influenced by the frequency with which users follow a link

I can see this being used by blackhat (auto-clicks and such).

 

[technologyslice]

I can see many points that algo will break down. It will be exploited just like Google.