News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace social network site will start to aggregate news and allow its 160 million users to rank stories.

As the content is ranked, it will be pushed down several "channels" like sports and entertainment. Advertisers can then wed their campaigns to the kind of content that they want to target. According to The Financial Times (subscription required): "The response from advertisers so far has been fantastic," said Brian Norgard, co-founder or Newroo, a news aggregation service that was acquired by News Corp last year and integrated with MySpace. "Every advertiser wants to reach a specific customer and we are helping them to do that through these [news] channels."

Well, maybe. Time Warner's Inc. (NYSE: TWX) Netscape and independent company Digg.com have been working this model for quite some time now. A look at their websites would not indicate that there is much targetting going on there beyond Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) text ads.

The problem with news ranking products is that they don't have huge audiences. Digg ranks No. 86 and Netscape ranks No. 539, according to Alexa. Traffic to both sites also is declining, making them less attractive to advertisers who spend most of their money on the top 20 sites.

MySpace obviously has a huge audience, but the advertising success of its news ranking service will depend on how many of its users decide that they want to rank news.

Do people go to a social networking site to do that? Maybe not.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

The Alexa Internet ranking system is widely used as a technical gauge for reviewing performance of specific websites. While similar in concept to the Nielsen ratings for television viewership, Alexa data is drawn from a deeper pool of resources but some say from a narrower demographic.

Alexa rankings are gained by data submitted through users of the Alexa toolbar. With over 10 million of those toolbars currently downloaded, one could accept the suggestion that the Alexa user base represents a fair statistical sample. Alexa was founded in April 1996 and was acquired by Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) in 1999 for approximately $250 million in Amazon stock.

According to audience figures at Alexa which measures traffic and page views at hundreds of thousands of internet websites, many of the Time Warner online properties are having trouble maintaining their audiences.

Alexa measures audience for the most recent day, a weekly average, and a three month average. The measurement system also shows the change in the three month average versus the previous three months. Alexa's system tracks usage on millions of toolbars downloaded onto PCs by their users. There has always been some debate about whether the figures are as accurate as numbers from some of Alexa's competitors. A "sense check" of the top sites on Alexa does make sense. Worldwide, Yahoo!.com is ranked first, followed by MSN, Google, baidu.com, qq.com, MySpace and sina.com. The presence of several large Chinese websites seems logical.

The Alexa system competes to some extent with the two large web audience measurement firms, Neilsen/NetRatings and Comscore.

The figures are particularly important now, especially as AOL migrates from a subscription-supported model to one that relies primarily on internet advertising.

Amazon looks to be the first major web player to ditch Google as its primary search partner.  There is no official news yet but netizens are beginning to report that their A9 searches and Alexa searches are returning Windows Live (MSN search) results.

This comes on the tail of many web retailers taking a defensive stance to Google's release of Google Base, which lets retailers circumvent eBay and Amazon as aggregators and sell directly to the consumer.

This apparent small victory for Microsoft highlights the coming battle between Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google for search (search-revenue) supremacy.

This appears to be a win for Microsoft, a questionable move by Amazon, and a loss for Google.  When news becomes 'official' how will the markets react?