A New Competitor to PageRank
Recently, the San Francisco Chronical published an article claiming that a “PageRank Killer” has been launched. The article, found here, describes a new search engine system, called SEO engine. SEO engine creatse a notion of “link neighborhoods” that are indexed and searched individually. This goes against the traditional approach that Google and Bing implement, where the entire web is crawled and indexed at once. SEO engine claims that with their new approach, they can more cheaply and efficiently provide search services to the public. SEO engine was developed by a duo of researchers with degrees from Cornell University, with the help of former Yahoo! search executive, Dr. Larry Cornett. The startup had little funding, and was forced to develop innovative processes in order to make efficient use of their money. The services provided by SEO engine are only available to members with subscriptions at the current time, but SEO engine hopes to grow to service the general public soon.
When we discussed PageRank in class, and the HTIS algorithm, we used small examples, where our “web” was a collection of less than a dozen pages. With a graph of this size, we were able to quickly and easily compute PageRank values and Hub/Authority scores. However, we did not address the fact that the web, in reality, is incredibly large and complex. It would be very difficult for us to compute these scores on the full-size web with our iterative methods. While more complicated implementations of these algorithms exist using linear algebra and multi-threaded programs, crawling and indexing the web is still a very difficult task. SEO engine believes that they have made this task much simpler by making the web smaller in a sense. Creating the notion of Link Neighborhoods allows SEO engine to work with a set of smaller graphs on which it is easier to run these algorithms. This service looks at “backlinks” just as PageRank does, but it also allows users to see the inner workings of the algorithm, and provide feedback to improve the service. In this way, SEO engine has created a feedback loop that they hope, along with new, innovative techniquies, will change the way we search the web.
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