Microsoft launches "Page Hunt" game
To improve Bing results
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28 July 2009 16:00 GMT / By Duncan Geere
Microsoft has announced a little game that it's created to try and improve the search results on its Google competitor Bing. It's called Page Hunt, and asks you to guess what searches would lead you to a displayed page.
If the query you search for has the website in its top five results, you get points. 100 for #1. 90 for #2, 80 for #3, etc. If you can get a page to display while avoiding frequently-used queries, you get bonus points.
The value comes because Microsoft gets to see what words people would associate with certain pages. If everyone labels a page something that it doesn't have in its database, then it can introduce that term into its results.
The researchers behind the project - Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar at Microsoft, and colleagues from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong - have discovered one thing already - the longer a page's URL, the harder it was for users to match the page to query words.
What's your best score? We got 1955 on our first go, so that's the number to beat.
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