It seems like Microsoft knows just how bored most people are at work. They know that there are thousands and thousands of bored cubicle dwellers, struggling to stay awake, who will do absolutely anything to kill a few minutes, even if that means playing Page Hunt. Don’t get me wrong, when I first heard about it, I played a couple rounds of the crowdsourcing-program-disguised-as-a-game. But then I’ll do just about anything to avoid work.

Page Hunt is a new online game that tests your search skills, while also helping Microsoft improve their search engine Bing. The idea is pretty simple. The player is served up a series of random web pages. The challenge is to look at each page, then determine what you would have to enter in a search box in order to have that page appear in the top 5 rankings in a Bing search. Guess right and you get a bunch of points. Guess wrong and you get nothing. Of course, you still get nothing even if you do get a bunch of points, but no matter.

Of course, the whole thing isn’t designed just to help you have fun while honing your search skills. It’s really designed to help Bing improve the accuracy of its search results. But Microsoft did a decent job of making it at least feel like a game, with high scores, a ticking clock and graphics and all that stuff.

From recent reports, it seems like Bing is doing pretty well. In July, their percentage of seach traffic rose half a percentage point to 8.9% Google is still the King Kamehameha of search engines, with 64.7% of search engine traffic, but that number dropped a bit, with Bing gobbling up the extra traffic. So if you feel the urge to hitch your wagon to a winner, well, go find a fun game to play on Google. But if you like the idea of helping out the underdog, albeit one that lives in a gold-plated doghouse on Bill Gates’ lawn, then give Page Hunt a try. And I betcha can’t beat 600 points.

Have a custom web application you need built? Contact Thirdi today!

Related posts:

1. SEO in the Post-Bing World
2. Yahoo and Microsoft partner to challenge Google’s internet supremacy
3. Google Gobbles All Competition

Tags: Bing, crowdsourcing, Google, Page Hunt, search engine

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 5:07 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.