PopRank- Is it PageRank Brother from MSN?

The other day I was researchingÂ on how to develop a Vertical Search Engine or “Vortal” in GoogleÂ and stumbled upon a very interesting yet not-so-popular (obviously!) research paper fromMicrosoft Research News & Highlights titled - Search Objective Gets a Refined Approach by Rob Knies.

Just in-case people don’t know what “Vertical Search engines” are, these are special search engines focuing their search within a particual domain (medicine/physics/biology/education/library/php etc)Â as against present day general search engines (Google/Yahoo/MSN)Â which are used to search wide variety of informartion.

Coming back to the research paper- it dealt with how to improve upon the present day search process to develop a more specialized search engines for specific domains. According to Wen and Nie - the researchers- “We want to develop a better search engine for some specific domains.

While doing pioneering research in the field of Vertical search (they call it- Object-Level Vertical Search) they coined PopRank.

PopRank is aÂ link-analysis model to rank the objects (within a web pages such as databases, person, paper, organization etc)Â within a specificÂ domain rather then rank web pages as a whole.

PopRank’s older brother PageRank-from Google- on the other hand rank web pages as a whole, not necessoraly from within a specific domain-Â based on certain algorithm called Search Algorithm.

That is to say PageRank ranks a webpage as a whole where an PopRank ranks objects which a web page on the basis of link analysis. Just like web pages are linked to each other, objects too are linked to each other based on corelations among them.

PopRank extends the PageRank by adding a Popularoty Propogation Factor (PPF) to each link pointing to an object.

A more detailed study of the paper can be done at http://www2005.org/cdrom/docs/p567.pdf.

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