I've often thought this approach makes sense and wondered why it didn't seem more common.
The two challenges are gathering the information and interpreting it. Logging which links are clicked is obviously easy but not necessarily a good indicator of interest (for instance I'll often Ctrl-Click a number of links then read them rather than click one at a time until I find what I want).
It sounds like they are using a representative sample of users with a plug in to allow them to collect more advanced information (such as time spent) which is an interesting approach.
I can imagine that there may be false positives though - for instance a site that looks like it should contain the desired information (but actually doesn't) might occupy users for longer than a page with the answer they want right at the top.
PageRank (based on publishers' idea of relevance, though linking) can yield false positives, too. But, I guess someone who goes to the trouble of publishing a document will have a more considered opinion than readers of that document.
BrowserRank is a bit like Web 2.0 PageRank, in that it operates on user voting. It would be nice if you could nominate whose reading habits you would contribute to the ranking you see. Maybe a new job title could be "browser leader", where you sell your browsing data, if you are really good at wasting time. Average that over a million browser leaders, and you have an interesting dataset for Ranking.
The other problem is scale (as someone said). Modeling a web of documents is hard enough; modeling all the readers of those documents is a lot more data - but certainly possible to go some way towards it. Hardware gets cheaper and cheaper, but web adoption will saturate soonish, so we'll get there.
It's not hard to imagine the SEO "engineering" taking an all-new direction: trying to keep visitors as long as possible on a given web page. Terrible times ahead. Unless, of course, Microsoft's idea fails like everything else they undertake on the Internet.
This seems like the sort of thing that botnets would excel at. Instead of just a link farm, unscrupulous companies could have a whole bunch of machines "clicking" away within their link farms to make it look like there is actually user traffic.
1. Most people find websites through Google. MS wants to measure what websites people are going to, well that is going to be influenced by pagerank.
2. It will be like alexa where there sample data just covers some users and not a great cross section of Internet users. Unless if MS builds this into the browser, which would cause a firestorm of protest.
3. Pagerank uses obvious indicators of value which BrowseRank seems more like the Yahoo home page where the top seaches box give you links to Jessica Alba pictures, the Batman movie, etc. Driven by popular culture.
Seems a bit silly to compare spam page avoidance between PageRank and BrowseRank, when all the spam pages have been specifically targetted to get a high PageRank.
The two challenges are gathering the information and interpreting it. Logging which links are clicked is obviously easy but not necessarily a good indicator of interest (for instance I'll often Ctrl-Click a number of links then read them rather than click one at a time until I find what I want).
It sounds like they are using a representative sample of users with a plug in to allow them to collect more advanced information (such as time spent) which is an interesting approach.
I can imagine that there may be false positives though - for instance a site that looks like it should contain the desired information (but actually doesn't) might occupy users for longer than a page with the answer they want right at the top.