The goal of a new online game called Page Hunt is to elicit data from online players that "can be used to provide metadata for pages, provide query alterations for use in query refinement, and identify ranking issues," wrote a Microsoft Research team led by Raman Chandrasekar and Chris Quirk.

A Test Spin

Microsoft Research has already launched an online demo version of Page Hunt that gives gaming aficionados an opportunity to take it for a test drive. Here's how it works:

Players are shown a random Web page without the URL and are asked to submit one or more words as the most likely query for the site. The game obtains the top search results for the query from Bing and displays them in order. Points are awarded to players landing in the top five query slots, with 300 points being the top score per search.

The primary goal of Microsoft's Page Hunt effort is to generate Web user responses that search-engine designers can use to fine-tune their search algorithms in ways that best mirror the human search experience. At each step of the game, the researchers record the player's screen name or an anonymous id; the Web page URL; the query; whether it was successful and, if so, at what rank position; the time; and the points the player got for this query.

"The player's query behaves as a tag or label for the page," the report's authors observed. "When the player gets it right, this is valuable; but even when it is wrong, the label can be useful."

The Research Challenge

A pilot experiment in which several hundred Microsoft employees participated as Page Hunt players showed researchers that there is a direct relationship between the length of a URL and the ability of search engines to find its associated Web page.

"As the length of URL of the page increases, the pages are harder to find," the report's authors wrote. "Findability can be used to compare" the relevance or "goodness of search engines, and we intend to work further in this area."

At the moment, the Page Hunt queries generated by players online are not being fed back to the Bing search engine, but that could change over time. "The research challenge is to ensure that we get useful data comparable to data from other sources, and to develop efficient methods to use this data to improve search," the report's authors said.

Microsoft's Page Hunt experiment also is likely to lead to the launch of other gaming efforts that channel input from Web surfers in ways that help to enhance the overall search experience.

"To the best of our knowledge, Page Hunt is the first single-player non-collaborative human computation game," the report's authors said. "We plan to continue our work, creating games that can be used to improve search" and "that players find entertaining and captivating."