Microsoft turns search into a game called Page Hunt. All in the name of science, of course. Page Hunt ask players to ensures a certain page lands in the top five results…

“the game presents players with web pages and asks them to guess the queries that would produce the page within its first five results. Players score 100 points if the page is no.1 on the list, 90 points if it’s no.2, and so on. Bonuses are also awarded for avoiding frequently-used queries.”

Not quite as gripping as the sublime Plants vs. Zombies, but it has some rough-edged charm. And there’s one curious finding already:

“…the longer a page’s URL (in characters), the harder it was for users to match the page to query words. The research doesn’t speculate about why this should be, but here’s a graph showing the relationship between URL length and the ‘findability’ of a page.”

Perhaps there’s a lesson here for those who use ridiculously long and impenetrable scripted URLs?