Lord of the Web

Microsoft is taking so many steps to stay in the hunt when it comes to the search engine market. Bing, the search engine, oops, decision engine, from Microsoft made some initial waves but hasn’t made any serious dent even in the search share of second place Yahoo, much less that of Google.

One of those steps is Page Hunt, which is, well, actually a game that users use to play around with Bing. The game is about finding the right keywords associated with a web page that is shown on the screen ( without the URL). If the keywords you specify return the page that was displayed as one of the top five results, you score points and move ahead to the next page.

The idea is to make users acquainted with how Bing works and more importantly, for Microsoft to get some useful data on how users actually search and hence improve its search algorithms. I think the game was pretty insightful to me about how good Bing really is for the keywords that I provide. I was also comparingt these results with those given by Google and I found that the two SEs were pretty neck-to-neck and there was very little to distinguish between them ( something that users across the world have acknowledged. But yeah, Google is Google and Bing has to be way better, not almost equal, than Google to get some stronghold in the search market.)

And btw, the game requires Silverlight ( something that I have fallen in love with, but Page Hunt doesn’t seem to work, at the time of writing this post, on Firefox or Opera. Even though the game loads, some exceptions are thrown.)