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Google Image Labeler
vandalman writes to tell us that Google is betting on the obsessive compulsive need for many users to see big numbers next to their name with a new beta service called Google Image Labeler. From the description: "You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session."
First Google Trends, and now this service. They may seem to be valueless business models, but I suspect Google is getting some very interesting data from the people who play the game and access the service. At the least it's fodder for psychology papers. At best I think Google will be using the data to refine its search engine and help target ads.
Ah, precious Google points, the currency of the future.
Until then, it's like Amazon Mechanical Turk, except you work for free.
On a completely unrelated note, this would be a handy service for spammers to get their CAPTCHAs solved for free.
Google's brilliance shines through again.
I'm pretty sure I've seen some university project identical to this some time (1 year ?) ago. So it's definitely been done before. Although google does make a perfect (or at least a lot more suited) maintainer for such a project.
I think it's pretty ridiculous, but I do find myself competing for ranking in the system. It's human nature to be competitive, and I know from experience that I'm competitive in even some rather ridiculous circumstances.
It's actually a lot more fun (and social) than many computer games I've played, because it's not just about finding applicable labels, but labels that you think the other person will guess. Also looking at what kinds of things matched before gives you some feeling of who you're partnered with, and what words they will likely use.
To me this looks like a winner, for Google at least. And you know what? If this is entertainment, and it helps people find the information they need, I don't mind doing "work" for Google, not one bit. So far they've been very good to me, and as long as that keeps up, I can't feel bad for supporting them.
As for myself, I found the image sizes too small, but I suppose we are basing the keywords on first impressions and are expected to come from the image search.
It might be a copyright issue as well, after all the images come from external sites.
Image Multi Search
Interestingly, back in July, the creator of the ESP Game gave a talk at Google on it and how such games could be used in stead of computer-based classification.... (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-82464639 80976635143&q=ESP+Game&hl=en)
Enquiring minds want to know!
And it's kinda flawed at the moment. Seems to hang a lot for one thing, but the main problem is that the images are so ridiculously tiny. Google aren't going to get useful tags that way - most of the points of agreement end up being words like "man" or "people" or "building". It's frustrating, because often it's clearly a specific building, maybe even with a sign saying EXACTLY what it is, except that the text is half a pixel high.
That said, the end-of-game summary is an illuminating (and terrifying) revelation of just how bad some people's spelling is.
It desperately needs larger pictures - at that scale it's very hard to see what they are.
www.sjbaker.org
I just coded up a little bot that did that, and sent random words from the dictionary file. Lets see how high it gets.
I played about 10 times. 9 out of the 10 times, I got really lame people who mostly wanted to pass. 1 time, I got someone who was actually mentally engaged in the game and we got 900 points. It would be fun to do better, but if finding a non-retarded partner is typically such a pain, I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Here is the tech talk on Human Computation by Luis von Ahn (Asst Prof, CMU) describing the concept.
As a non-native English speaker, this game has allowed me to learn new words, and how people from other cultures see a same image. I see hands where others see labor, that kind of think.
If you haven't tried it, try it: you'll learn things about how people perceive pictures. And if your random partner has the same thinking schemes than you, you'll get points!
Google points worth nothing, but that's Google points. Yeah.
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
They're either upgrading their pigeons to Slashus-dottus-sapiens or they're outsourcing and putting these pigeons out of work. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html