Google Image Labeler - brilliant and entertaining
You gotta love the guys at Google. They tackle huge problems and come up creative ways to solve them. Image analysis has always been tricky, but Google has found an ingenious way to do it. They basically made a game out of human image analysis. They call it Google Image Labeler.
The idea is simple. You log in either with a google account or as a guest then you’re paired up with a partner somewhere out in cyberspace. You and your partner have two minutes to look at pictures from google images, one at a time, and write tags/keywords to describe the image. If you and your partner get a match on a term, you are awarded “points” and you move on to the next image. If you can’t come up with any words that match, you can press “Pass” to move on to the next image.
If you get enough points, you show up on the leaderboard for the day or for all time. Given the scores on the leaderboard for today, I’m not sure there are a TON of people doing this, but certainly enough people volunteering their 2 minute segments to Google to make this worthwhile.
I love it when a high tech company like Google can come up with a elegant and simple solution to such a difficult problem. This is what makes companies successful. Taking on huge problems that seem impossible (tagging millions of images per day) and finding out-of-the-box solutions to solve them.
Rock on Google!
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