Google better watch out: there might be a new competitor in town for PageRank.

CNet reports that Microsoft has announced a new idea that they call BrowseRank, which they hope will help boost the search engine’s popularity.

For those that may not be familiar with Google’s PageRank, CNet explains it as “an algorithm that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages.”

However, Microsoft BrowseRank is a little bit different in that it uses what they call a user browsing graph that ranks Web pages by people’s behaviour.

“The more visits of the page made by the users and the longer time periods spent by the users on the page, the more likely the page is important. We can leverage hundreds of millions of users’ implicit voting on page importance,” the researchers said in BrowseRank: Letting Web Users Vote for Page Importance, a paper from the SIGIR conference this week in Singapore.

With authors of this paper from Microsoft Research Asia, Nanaki University, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University this is obviously something that Microsoft is putting a lot of effort into in order to catch-up to Google.

This new project from Microsoft is still in the development stage. So we will need to wait a little while before we see any real benefit for website owners, but when we hear anything more we will let you know.

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