Fav5

My pick of this week's top 5 items of interest:

1. It's official: Google's Knol, a Wikipedia-like source of user-contributed information, is now available to the public. Lots of people are talking about it. I found the interface a little lacking... there's a search box and a list of some randomly selected Knols, but I can't figure out how to browse by subject (of course it's difficult to do this in Wikipedia as well). Also I can't tell how many knols there are yet; a search for "a" shows about 80 knols, and most appear to be health-related. My guess is the tech guys may stick with Wikipedia.
   


2. At this week's SIGIR'08 conference, Microsoft Research presented a paper called BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance. The paper introduces a new relevance ranking algorithm called BrowseRank. Instead of relying on the web graph to assign web page importance as PageRank does, BrowseRank assigns importance based on users' browsing behavior. A good summary of the paper is at CNET News.
   


3. Facebook will soon be using Microsoft's web search technology to give search results and sponsored ads. Currently Google is powering MySpace.
   


4. According to a new report from the antivirus company Sophos, they have detected over 16,000 malicious web pages each day in the first half of 2008, most using SQL-injection techniques. Blogspot.com hosts the largest number of malicious web pages, mostly because of how easy it is to setup a blog with this service and to inject
   


5. You'd better hurry: The domain ☼.com is still available! Oh, and Google has discovered at least 1 trillion pages on the Web.