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?"

Comments

So you're anchoring the algorithm...

[HasselhoffThePaladin]

So they're anchoring the algorithm in real-world data? Truly groundbreaking...

Re:So you're anchoring the algorithm...

[MeatBag PussRocket]

i wouldnt call it a game so much as cleverly disguising crowd sourcing their work. its a really good idea actually.... excuse me, i need to go design a 'points system' where users, er... i mean players get points when they fix their own computer issues and put a basic trouble shooting guide in a flash docume-- er, game.

Re:So you're anchoring the algorithm...

[Tynin]

Seems like this would be ripe for abuse. Get a group of people together like the /b/ group on 4chan, have them start labeling mundane links with porn terms, and porn links with mundane terms. I don't think it would work if only a few people did it, but if you had a large enough group I would think you could make a ton of the data they are gathering useless.

Finally...

[A. B3ttik]

I have a valid excuse to surf porn.

It's a shame...

[Tenek]

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.

Doomed to fail

[girlintraining]

...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. :\

Re:Doomed to fail

[sopssa]

Guys, learn one of the great rules in IT: Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should.

But as long as it has some users, its good info for MS. I wont be using it, and you probably wont be either, but there probably are people who like to try it out of interest. Maybe even now and then just to see random websites or whatever fun it gives them. Anoher great rule of IT: You can just leave it in the background and it doesn't affect your main business in any way. Microsoft and Bing are large enough to do quite random stuff and it will still have its users. And it goes along with Bing's strategy aswell -- Shoot there, shoot here, try out things and be innovative. So far its working great for them (hell, thats what google does too)

Err...

[DavidR1991]

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

Re:Err...

[DavidR1991]

I hate it when some moron takes it upon themselves to mod down legitimate complaints. Seriously - this was not some substance-less "LOL ITZ BAD" comment: all I noticed from this "game" was how terrible the query -> result relationship worked.

Re:MS silverlight

[mcgrew]

Well, I won't be installing Silverlight unless it becomes ubiquitous, but if I were Microsoft I'd be "eating my own dog food" (as they say) too. If they won't use it themselves, why would they expect you to? I'm sure their internal documents are Word.

I wonder, though, if the site could have been done with plain old HTML/CSS. As I'm not installing silverlight I guess I won't find out.

Bewildering, pointless, and laborious

[dpbsmith]

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.

This can only make Bing worse

[Overzeetop]

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.