pagerank is patented it works with a measure of links between trusted sites; a new idea I call Well Read complements or partially replaces pagerank at a competing site; visualize a transparent gif column right near the scroll bar; mouseover event at the transparent gif goes with scroll bar usage;
if
the person uses the scroll bar once or twice that means the html page has a high readership application rank: it is Well Read; googles ad area is a module that could create the Well Read transparent gif sensor as well as pass the data back to google; also you could just use whats known as a web beacon; further the sensors could be as a grid on the page perhaps with CSS or transparent letters that have mouseover scripting
with pagerank you get what UC berkeley links to; with Well Read you get what people like enough to read fully; combined you get those pages that UC berkeley links that people actually purposefully dwell on; the most useful part of the web
here's a critics FAQ; then there's a word about microsoft
//scrollwheels
a --- transparent gif grid is able to detect any vertical scrollwheel activity
//Dragging the scroll bar, clicking the scroll bar track or pointers, or using the cursor keys or page down or the scrollwheel has no effect on the image if the mouse pointer is off the window
that is fine as rather than ask every visitor to the mall what they think of build-a-bear you could just ask a few hundred to get a picture of visit length
//Mouseover gifs would also trigger mouse movement events unrelated to scrolling up or down, like moving the mouse to the 'close window' button, or back button etc - mouse movement does not have a direct correlation to attention to content
thats why the gif grid variables have different names; we care a bunch more about the right side gifs as well as the derived oscillate on page scrollwheel data
a word about microsoft: microsoft has an urge to be a search engine presence neogoogle I may give them an opportunity; there is a different opportunity which is compelling: javascript can say when the [control] then "c" key events of Copy [^c] events happen on a page; accumulating data on what pages are wonderful such that users actually copy data from them creates a very high utility ranking
if it is trust legal using the windows OS to be aware of which parts of microsoft office are up then you get data on pages that people actually copy online data from onto spreadsheets, powerpoint, or word; this creates the opportunity to make a MSN productivity plus search engine that might be measurably effective at building productivity at work
pagerank: trusted data
well read: pages that users dwell on to read
App useful: pages with data so marvelous it gets copied
those three together create very high utility search