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Microsoft Uses Human Computing Game To Tune Bing
Al writes "Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way to fine-tune the algorithms behind the company's new search engine, Bing: a game that harnesses human computing power to improve the results. Called Page Hunt, the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a web page and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first five results. The idea is to better understand user behavior and expectations and ultimately improve its search algorithms. Other human-computing projects have sought to digitize out-of-print text (reCAPTCHA) and image labeling (Google Image Labeler). Can Microsoft use a similar approach to gain the edge over its rival? Or does Google already have the edge with SearchWiki, which lets searchers re-rank its results?"
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
So they're anchoring the algorithm in real-world data? Truly groundbreaking...
After the success of Page Hunt, Microsoft is developing a sequel called File Reports. Players earn points by filling out real business forms and increasing productivity!
That'll put a spoke in their wheel.
needs MS silverlight to run
...and wait eleven months to receive it. Oh Live Search Club, your spirit will haunt us forever.
That said, Google Image Labeler has already proven the viability of this method of tagging and indexing. I think. Has anything really come of the GIL project?
I have a valid excuse to surf porn.
The game gets boring really quickly the first time you run out of "reasonable" search terms and just tack on some exact quote from the page. "His father dies during the travel" is probably not going to help them very much, but it *will* get you to a specific bio of Paul Gauguin.
Soon they'll be breeding us like cattle.
Stick with the pigeons as god intends.
If users have the ability to tailor search results, won't page rank "fixers" (aka spammers) have an easier time? Or am I missing something?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
This must be the beta. I don't see mention of a monthly charge, yet.
Like in that movie where people were in pods living in a virtual world while their body heat was being extracted? No thanks.
...the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a webpage and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first 5 results.
Gee, that sounds SO much more fun than playing the Sims! Not. reCAPTCHA works only because the user wants to get to what's after it, and doesn't require another downloaded plugin or frequent interaction. Guys, learn one of the great rules in IT: Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should. If you want to investigate user behavior, do what everybody else in the industry has done -- install malware onto the user's machines and track their habits. :\
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
shows users a webpage and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first 5 results
How much am I being paid? I suppose it is recession after all..
I don't like to lose.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
I've been taking a look at it and the thing that seems to stand out the most is that it's labeled Live Search. It hasn't adopted the Bing color scheme either. Did these guys not get the memo or something?
I sure hope no one tells 4chan about this.
Likely crazy, but I'd suggest drinking more water.
I will stick my karmic neck out and humor you.
Thanks.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
In theory, even if the venture is successul, what you will get is a search engine that understands gamers well. Is that going to improve your market share?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In other words, Microsoft service does not have solution. Microsoft asks users to provide results for themselves...
"Other human-computing projects have sought to digitize out-of-print text (reCAPTCHA) and image labeling (Google Image Labeler)."
Come up with a search to find the pages shown within 5 seconds?
I'd settle for "lesbian kissing" not turning up 30,000 pages of BJ pictures.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
All this made me realise is how terrible Bing's search is. I mean... some of the queries failed to return the correct site, and I was literally "spelling it out" (full name of the page complete with some of the exact sentences/phrases on it).
If anything, this just makes Bing seem like a lost cause - it made the 'game' seem unfair (the engine was failing, not me) and completely pointless
This would be easy to write as a regular web page, but NO they have to try and shove silverlight out in the wild yet again. Two missions accomplished in one shot. What will it take to make Silverlight go away? And yes, I am no fan of flash either.
Instead of asking users to label webpages, which would understandably bore them to death, they are asking them to come up with search queries that would have presented the page as a result! Genial! And we get to be introduced to Silverlight in the process! Sign me up.
You're not crazy. Just make sure you get us to Earth, m'kay?
This was my job about three years ago. I would sit at home while a client dished out web queries, and I identified which sites were good results (they were nearly always spam). I would need to judge each web page in about three seconds. This speed was figured so that I could keep up my required quota, while still taking many, many 6.5 minute breaks (this being the longest amount of time before the client automatically logged out). This job drove me crazy. After looking at thousands and thousands of spam-pages your brain was jelly, and you want a free I-pod for no reason at all. You are also now listening to Drum and Bass internet radio, because you know that if you listen to music you like it will distract you. The only rewarding moment was when I found the feminist/lesbian-focus Star Trek fan fiction.
I've got better things to do with my time than to do MS' job for them while having to install Silverlight at the same time.
Though without Silverlight, it may have been fun to come up with search queries for innocent things that involve gay animal sex, clown shoes and old people's inability to control their bowels.
It's like the Chain Factor ARG all over again!
that I'm a happy Opera user!?
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Oh bollocks!
This "game" is about as much fun to play as those "fun with subtraction" pages in the fourth grade arithmetic book. It's bewildering, pointless, and laborious. And as nearly as I can tell there are no prizes. It's too clever by half.
A straightforward feedback link asking whether an ordinary Bing search got you the results you wanted would surely be more effective. Better yet would be an option to submit failed Bing searches to a human being who would attempt to find the answer and email it to you.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Or does Google already have the edge with SearchWiki, which lets searchers re-rank its results.
Anybody who has used SearchWiki to re-rank Google results, hold you hand up. Up high. Keep 'em up. Anyone? I didn't think so.
I think you have been listening to too much Metallica are going deaf. The hum is your ear saying goodbye to that frequency, or it could be a medical condition. Check out 'Tinnitus" and "hum".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
If you can say "I Googled this", can you also say "I Bunged that"?
The director of this department is Alex Trebeck.
When they happen on an AVI or WAV the score is doubled.
The final round consists of a handwritten query and a wager of how many hits the target query will actually manifest.
It is all so exciting. Exciting enough on which to base a TV show!
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Drive Fast. Take chances.
pay people to play a game which hits your search engine It's also a way to train people to use search terms for MS BING which return expected results. ie, it's also a training game too.
The next thing you know, they'll mod the game so it does the inverse, the top ranked "players" would get a search string and pick the best results. This would be timed and more points/money would go their way based on solution time and solution quality. Little would the "players" know that they really were just becoming part of the BING system and their results were getting fed right back to users searching.
These Microsoft guys are so smucking fart.
That last thing I need is "real people" screwing up the tags on a site. I recently got a new PC for home theater, and installed absolutely as little as possible on it (not even firefox - heresy, I know). I used the default search the first couple of times - forgetting that it wasn't google - and was amazed at how poorly the results came back. Even specific text known to be on the page (down to filenames I was trying to find for installing necessary codecs) wouldn't bring up the pages I needed. I can only assume that with (primarily) non-technical people typing in search keywords for pages it will just get worse.
You might say that a decade and a half of old search engine technology has trained me to make computer-based queries, but damnit it works, and I don't look forward to the unwashed masses breaking it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Are you sure it isn't the Caponians? I loved that game...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It looks like another case of MS completely missing the point... you're presented with a webpage, ex: the home page of www.exampleoftravelpage.com and asked to make it end up in the top five search results, so I search on "exampleoftravelpage.com" and other words that are actually on the front page, maybe like "Home" "current deals" etc.
...none of which worked anyway, unless those happened to be words on the webpage (as far as making the top five searches)
I get the page to come up #1 in the Bing search, but what have I proven? Only that I know a bunch of the words on the home page. Pretty much exactly the opposite of how a user would search. If I'm searching for a site, I DON'T know what's going to be on that site's page... that's why I'm searching.
If I happened to know the website name, I would just type it in the address bar, not search on it. And as far as this game is concerned, it didn't work to search on it anyway. If I search on an actual domain name, should not the domain root be THE first search result?
If I'm looking for travel pages (like in this example) I might search on "travel" or "vacations" or the actual destination I wish to travel to.
Either they've missed the point of how a search engine works, or I've missed the point of their game... perhaps both issues are at work here.
As if we want Silverlight... Gross! At least I have to hand it to Microsoft.... instead of just ignoring Linux users, or insulting them with "click here for the plugin" and being handed some useless .exe, you get this now:
"Install Silverlight. Experience this in Silverlight Install the free Plug-in. Microsoft Silverlight may not be supported on your computer's hardware or operating system. If you are using a Linux, FreeBSD or SolarisOS operating system, please press the Click to Install button to get the appropriate installation package for Silverlight."
And you click and it takes you to go-mono.com/moonlight! Wow! Microsoft admitting that Linux actually exists?? And providing a working link to an actual program to handle it??? Amazing!
Still won't install it, though :)
There are so many words that translate roughly to 'penis', that a concerted effort on the part of gay pron enthusiasts could do some serious damage to the research results of such a project. Not that I would ever condone such an effort, or encourage someone of considerable means to provide free dew, doritos, parking and a wireless hotspot in a major metropolitain area in support of it. That'd be unethical.
Search for +steve +chair on Bing ...
First result: Steve's Chair Caning Service;Full service antique chair caning
Options include:
# HAND CANE
# RUSH SEATING
# SPLINT WORK
# HONG KONG GRASS
# FANCY PATTERNS
# PRESS CANE
# DANISH CORD
Curiously, the copyright notice on Steve's page is:
"© BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON"
Google's already implemented this for their image search: http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ Except no one can fuck up the tags because you're connected with another player and you have to guess the same tag. Bing = epic fail, I swear on my life, hope to die if I ever use it. :D
. . .supposed to be fun?
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
I came. I saw. I found five things. I went to Google. I found five things sorted by everyone else in the whole damn world to the top of a nearly useless commercial-cum-blogosphere popularity contest. Puhleeze. Make a librarian that understands cognitive differences. Let a thousand flowers bloom, to quote somebody. (Red Buttons?)
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Google don't need suck kind of game, actually they're paying people (13euros/hour) to ameliorate their search results. I've done that in the past and even if it's quite hard to get in, it's easy and better paid than many jobs.
No, it's not really working out that great. Bing has already been through many different names and iterations, and each time it has failed to gain as significant a part of the market as the money that has been put into the re-branding. The same tech is underneath, the only thing they're innovating on is buzzwords and slogans.