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Microsoft released in July, 2009 a game called “Page Hunt” that investigates users’ search behavior and gathers their search habits. The game shows some Web pages to the users and wants them to “hunt this page down”, in other words, to guess the search queries, by which this page would be placed within the first five Bing’s search results. It is a single-player game, where the human gets points, if the page takes one of the first five places within search results, and additional bonus if he avoids frequent queries.
The game was developed by Microsoft’s researchers Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was presented to the public at the conference “SIGIR 2009” in Boston. More information about the game you can find on this page:
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23898/
It is stated that the researchers have already got some interesting results. One of them – they found the correlation between the number of characters in URL and the difficulty to match this page with the appropriate search queries.
The “Page Hunt” game exploits “human computation” and is interesting from this point of view to our INSEMTIVES project, where we try to develop funny and entertaining “games with a purpose” (in the style of Luis von Ahn) for developing the Semantic Web.
Tags: "games with a purpose", search
