The innovation of google
I recently came across a new feature offered by google, and was pretty impressed.
Basically, it’s called google image labeler. It’s a small game, where the users do the work for google. Ingenious! I wish i could think of more ways to do this with my sites. You are partnered up with another web user, almost instantly, then you are both shown an image from google images. You both come up with words to describe the image, and once you both come up with one that is the same, you will move on to the next. A great way of improving google.
How does it work?
You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will:* View the same set of images.
* Provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see.
* Receive points when your label matches your partner’s label. The number of points will depend on how specific your label is.
* See more images 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.
Go check it out.
Yeah, this game is pretty cool. Although it can’t really be considered Google’s innovation. Luis von Ahn, came up with it as a grad student at Carnegie Mellon University and later licensed it to Google.
Heres interesting video that talks about this game, captchas, and other topics on “human computation”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=Luis+von+Ahn&total=5&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0
Its a little long though
I probably should have read that before I submitted it… For the record I can speak/type without sounding like a fool.
This is what is known as a “Mechanical Turk” (Amazon had an implementation of this idea way before Google), based off the first chess computer developed in the 18th century. Only it wasn’t a computer at all, it was just a human inside the machine moving the pieces.
The idea of humans completing tasks computers aren’t smart enough to do yet isn’t really a new innovation; Google have just managed to make the process “competitive”, and at the same time offering dual input verification.
This is why Google dominates the Internet. An ingenious way to have us do their work. You are right, Josh….this is impressive.
This seems like an interesting venture, but where is the long term incentive? After the initial desire to get ‘points’ I don’t really see why people would keep coming back to review images. Now if you got paid on the other hand I can see some geeks making a living from doing this!
@ Tom Ross: May I divert your eyes to the Amazon HIT scheme. http://mturk.amazon.com