Microsoft makes a game of Bing improvements
Microsoft has publicly released a game used to improve Bing’s search results. During a test period, it was the players’ mistakes rather than successes which assisted researchers.
The game, Page Hunt, is not exactly going to trouble my colleagues at GAMER.BLORGE. It simply involves displaying a Web page and asking the user to guess which search phrase will locate it through Bing. If their phrase produces a list with the page among the first five entries they score a point; if not, they have to try another phrase until they get it “right”. On selected pages there is a common search phrase listed; players get a bonus if they can avoid these terms in their selected theories.
Clearly this isn’t going to be many people’s idea of a great diversion which is why it was originally tested on 341 Microsoft employees. The game was developed by two Microsoft researchers along with staff from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Georgia (Atlanta) Institute of Technology who were on internships at the company.
The idea of the research was to learn more about how people expect to find a particular site. The hope was that the findings would offer information different to that from real-life searches where it’s not always possible to know exactly what the searcher was looking for.
One finding was that Bing’s strengths and weaknesses may not be greatly affected by the search savvy of individual users. A majority of sites were either found by everyone who looked for them (27 per cent) or by nobody at all (26 per cent).
The research also found pages with lengthy URLs were much harder to find. That’s not really a major surprise: those with short domains tend to be better known and established, while lengthy URLs can often indicate pages buried away in a site and likely to be linked to by fewer external sites.
The researchers also looked at query alteration, where the search engine looks at variations on the exact term a user searches for. Trying variations on punctuation and spelling was the most successful of these techniques for Bing, followed by converting the name of a site (BLORGE) to a site address (BLORGE.com). Other successful techniques included looking for the full versions of queries typed in as abbreviations, and the effective but difficult strategy of expressing the same concept in different words.
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July 29th, 2009
Microsloth must be getting truly desperate in their lame attempt to compete with Google in the arena of search engine competition.