Become.com (www.become.com), a search engine for product reviews and relevant buying information, which indexes over 2.2 billion pages of shopping related information from over 20 million websites, announced on March 14 Affinity Index Ranking (AIR), its revolutionary, patent-pending technology for ranking web pages. AIR provides highly targeted search results by understanding the context of pages on the Web.
AIR represents a fundamentally new approach to ranking Web pages that integrates advanced concepts from Applied Physics and Engineering Dynamics. AIR identifies exceptional Web pages by understanding the level of interconnection between valuable sites from within specific fields of interest. Unlike Become.com's AIR, Google's PageRank estimates the popularity of a given Web page by looking only at links into the page and doing so without any understanding of context.
Yeogirl Yun, founder, chairman and CTO at Become.com, said that AIR is the first ground-breaking advancement in search engine technology since Google introduced PageRank in the late 1990s, and that the AIR algorithms are highly advanced and ideally suited to specific topical areas such as shopping research.
Michael Yang, founder, president and CEO of Become.com, said that by introducing AIR, Become.com will vastly improve the overall search experience, that if a consumer is searching for a “television,” AIR returns information that can be used to aid the research process and help consumers educate themselves on buying a television, and that general search engines return irrelevant information such as various television stations.
