Microsoft Page Hunt

Microsoft's new search engine Bing is doing quite well in several search engine marketing studies. It could do better and one interesting idea that the Microsoft researchers had was to create a game that would help the search results to be better. The game is an experimental game that is currently available on the Microsoft Labs website.

It basically centers on the following idea: The quality of search engine results can be improved by adding a human factor into the equation. Page Hunt will display websites to its visitors who have to guess the search phrase that is used to find that specific page in Bing. Points are awarded if the website is in the top 5 of the search engine for that query.

The researchers on the other hand are able to learn from the data that the users enter. They can use both positive and negative hits to improve the quality of Bing search results. Websites that are displayed to users range from commercial websites to those that promote open source software like Open Office. It is however sometimes quite difficulty to find the right search term to get the points.

Head over to Page Hunt if you want to play a little game and help Microsoft improve the quality of the Bing search results. Page Hunt requires Microsoft Silverlight.

Update: The Microsoft Page Hunt website appears to have been pulled from the Internet. The url is not available anymore and a search on the Internet for the page does not return any hits either that link to a new page where you may find it instead.

Advertisement