Can a Search Game Help Bing Beat Google?

Bingbing is trying a lot of different things to market itself and may even end up powering Yahoo’s search results, but at the end of the day, its quality needs to be superior to GoogleGoogle if it’s going to win over the masses.

One interesting new effort to improve search results is a game – Page Hunt – that shows a series of web pages, asking users to guess which query would show each page in Bing’s top 5 results. Users score points based on their answers – 100 points if you guess a query that shows the page #1, 90 points if it’s in the #2 slot, etc.

You’ve got 3 minutes to get as many points as possible, with some pages being really easy to guess (like the official site of a celebrity) and others being seemingly impossible.

MIT’s Technology Review explains how this could help Bing improve search results:

“The idea is to gather useful information on user search habits which could be used to fine tune search algorithms and ranking scheme … Page Hunt is a clever twist on “human computation”–using people to perform tasks that computers find difficult to do.”

Essentially, Page Hunt is trying to figure out “what would users type to get to this page?” and then identify trends and habits. Judging from my experience in running through the game a few times, it’s hard to say whether Bing doesn’t understand me, or I just enter weird search terms, because I ran into a bunch of dead ends where I simply had to “skip” the page that the game was showing me.

However, that seems to be the point – if enough people play Page Hunt, Bing will conceivably get some interesting data that can help them refine their results for the better. A small but potentially useful step in trying to build a better search engine.