Pagehunt

Want to test your web surfing expertise? Play the new Bing game. Microsoft has recently started a new Bing Pagehunt game based on the Silverlight technology. This service is similar to Google image labeler or the service which allows you to personalize search results moving pages up in a search result and was launched at the SIGIR09 conference in Boston. The only difference is that Microsoft took care to make a game out of it. That way, it can create a free database of user requirements and search behaviour. Clever.

The official paper describes the game as :

A game where a player hunts down a given web page, trying to get that game in the top N results in a search engine using her queries.

The game has been developed by Hao Ma, Raman Chandrasekar, Chris Quirk and Abhishek Gupta. Good to see two indians amongst them. (After all we are largest population in the world!!)

Some interesting results have been observed from the game like a decrease in the findability with increase in the URL length.

Head over to play Pagehunt here(Requires Silverlight)  : Play Pagehunt

Read the paper on Pagehunt here (PDF 252KB) : About Pagehunt