Microsoft has found a way to make SEO research fun. Page Hunt is the new online Silverlight game that Microsoft has invented to help improve search results through Bing. The information collected from the game will be used to help researchers improve the Bing search platform to get better page results.
Here is how the game works: Players are shown a web page, which has been chosen at random. It is then up to the player to guess keywords that he/she expects will bring up that site in the first five search results. Players have 2 minutes and 58 seconds (apparently 3 minutes would make the game too easy) to guess a relevant keyword and are awarded points based on how close to the top of the rankings their terms put the website. To make the game even better, inventors have added animations and have provided ways to gain bonus points which put your name higher on a top-score list.
A game for internet junkies, online nerds, the newest Bing addicts and anyone who might be bored at work; a useful information harvester for others. The research team at Microsoft plans to use the data gathered from both positive and negative results, to improve the quality of Bing’s search results. And because the variety and scope of websites shown to players is large, the information is multifaceted.
Try your hand at Page Hunt today. But we have to warn you, those keywords are may leave you frustratingly mystified.
For more information, the team has provided a two-page research paper, “Page Hunt: Improving Search Engines Using Human Computation Games.”