Page hunt: improving search engines using human computation games

ABSTRACT

There has been a lot of work on evaluating and improving the relevance of web search engines. In this paper, we suggest using human computation games to elicit data from players that can be used to improve search. We describe Page Hunt, a single-player game. The data elicited using Page Hunt has several applications including providing metadata for pages, providing query alterations for use in query refinement, and identifying ranking issues. We describe an experiment with over 340 game players, and highlight some interesting aspects of the data obtained.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. Quirk, C. Brockett, and W. B. Dolan. Monolingual Machine Translation for Paraphrase Generation. In Proc. EMNLP 2004, Barcelona, Spain, 2004.
• 2: Luis von Ahn , Laura Dabbish, Labeling images with a computer game, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.319-326, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985733]
• 3: Luis von Ahn , Laura Dabbish, Designing games with a purpose, Communications of the ACM, v.51 n.8, August 2008 [doi>10.1145/1378704.1378719]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
human computation games, query alterations, relevance, web search