Page Hunt

Page Hunt is a game developed by Bing for investigating human research behavior. It is a so-called "game with a purpose", as it pursues additional goals: not only to provide entertainment but also to harness human computation for some specific research task. The term "games with a purpose" was coined by Luis von Ahn, inventor of CAPTCHA, co-organizer of the reCAPTCHA project, and inventor of a famous ESP game.[1]

Game rules

Page Hunt is only accessible through Internet Explorer, and requires Silverlight (freely downloadable from the Page Hunt website).

Unlike the games of Luis von Ahn, Page Hunt is a single-player game. It does not support user registration (and hence does not rank players).

Shown a webpage, the player must find the best keyword or keywords which would bring this page to the list of top 5 search results by Bing. The higher the rank of the page within the first 5 results, the more points the player gets. Achieving this without frequent queries earns a bonus. The game lasts for 3 minutes.

Scientific results

The data gained using Page Hunt has several applications:

  1. providing metadata for pages,
  2. providing query alterations for use in query refinement,
  3. identifying ranking issues.

On testing a game internally, the following results were gathered (as described in “Page Hunt: Improving search engines using human computation games”[2]): about 27% of the pages in the test database had 100% findability (it means that all the persons who were shown this page could bring it to the 5 best results), while almost the same number of pages (26%) were found by nobody. Thereby, a relation between the length URL and a webpage findability could be postulated: The longer the URL of the webpage, the harder it was to "hunt" it. Also the winning search queries were analyzed and classified. The queries that contain:

  1. Spelling or punctuation alterations
  2. Sitename to site alterations
  3. Acronym/Initialism-Expansion alterations
  4. Conceptual alterations

See also

References
  1. L. von Ahn: “Games with a purpose”. Computer, vol. 29(6), pp. 92–94, 2006.
  2. H. Ma, R. Chandrasekar, C. Quirk, A. Gupta: “Page Hunt: Improving search engines using human computation games”. Proceedings of the 32nd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 2009.
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