Microsoft Uses Human Computing Game To Tune Bing 119
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?"
Spammers... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Sounds riveting (Score:2, Interesting)
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..
Re:So you're anchoring the algorithm... (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe they can use the real world data to fix this issue
http://www.bing.com/search?q=why+is+microsoft+word+so+expensive&form=QBLH&qs=n [bing.com]
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=why+is+microsoft+word+so+expensive&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g1 [google.com]
Flooded with blog articles about the same query now, and yes, it looks like there's probably a technological reason (or at least viable excuse) for it, but it still seems pretty shady to me.
Will tune to gamers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Spammers... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are already multiple ways for spammer to tailor search results. You know, the webpages itself, thats why it's search results. You need the algorithms to protect that, so you obviously need algorithms to protect what data is used from this "game" aswell. This is just to give additional information to the search results, but same rules apply.
Re:What a brilliant idea! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So you're anchoring the algorithm... (Score:3, Interesting)
Indeed. Google only fine-tunes search results from more savvy users. It's a tad creepy, but they build a profile and know what you're interested in, and use that to send you the correct links.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Pandora&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq= [google.com]
What's your top link? Mine is OpenPandora.org
Bing spits out crap that I'm not at all interested in. Now I know why.