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The Technology Review reports the Microsoft research team designed a game to help make Bing a better search engine. The game is named Page Hunt and it presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it's no.2, and so on.
Here is a video demo, without sound, of me playing the game:
It is interesting, because it may show you how good or bad the Bing results are, in clear site. A WebmasterWorld thread has some fun quotes about this game:
Wow, Bing is crazy bad. I got like 1 out of 20 and some were very obvious.
I don't want to come across as a bing cheerleader, but I must say, that's a pretty dang creative idea to get the kind of direct feedback from users that might make for a better product. Will be interested to see if they post a general summation when the test has run it's course, as to whether they feel it gave them enough useful data to push bing another step forward. The better bing gets, the more competition we'll see in a field that needs more competition -- we'll all come out ahead...
Creative idea indeed, nice to see.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
