jatiN mahindrA doT coM

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.

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3. News Corp May De-List Themselves From Google & Partner With Microsoft Bing
4. Microsoft Bing November 2009 Search Update?
5. Is Microsoft Bing Finally Figuring Out 301 Redirects?
6. Microsoft Trumpets In-Game Ad Performance (Recommended Reading)
7. Bing Adds Visual Search & More Links On Home Page
8. Microsoft Says Ditch TV and Go In-Game
9. Microsoft Bing Still Spamming Fake Referrers In Webmaster Log Files
10. What is “Page Score” in Bing Webmaster Tools?
11. Cuil Reviews Bing: SEOs Take Notice
12. Microsoft Launches SDK for Silverlight Bing Apps