title: Page Hunt
text: # Page Hunt
  
  Page Hunt is a game developed by Bing for investigating human research behavior. It is a so-called "game with a purpose", as it pursues additional goals: not only to provide entertainment but also to harness human computation for some specific research task. The term "games with a purpose" was coined by Luis von Ahn, inventor of CAPTCHA, co-organizer of the reCAPTCHA project, and inventor of a famous ESP game.
  
  ## Game rules
  
  Page Hunt is only accessible through Internet Explorer, and requires Silverlight (freely downloadable from the Page Hunt website).
  
  Unlike the games of Luis von Ahn, Page Hunt is a single-player game. It does not support user registration (and hence does not rank players).
  
  Shown a webpage, the player must find the best keyword or keywords which would bring this page to the list of top 5 search results by Bing. The higher the rank of the page within the first 5 results, the more points the player gets. Achieving this without frequent queries earns a bonus. The game lasts for 3 minutes.
  
  ## Scientific results
  
  The data gained using Page Hunt has several applications:
  
  * providing metadata for pages,
  * providing query alterations for use in query refinement,
  * identifying ranking issues.
  
  On testing a game internally, the following results were gathered (as described in “Page Hunt: Improving search engines using human computation games”): about 27% of the pages in the test database had 100% findability (it means that all the persons who were shown this page could bring it to the 5 best results), while almost the same number of pages (26%) were found by nobody. Thereby, a relation between the length URL and a webpage findability could be postulated: The longer the URL of the webpage, the harder it was to "hunt" it. Also the winning search queries were analyzed and classified. The queries that contain:
  
  * Spelling or punctuation alterations
  * Sitename to site alterations
  * Acronym/Initialism-Expansion alterations
  * Conceptual alterations
  