Google image labeler

Not sure how many of you have tried this new google service. It looks like a game, smells like a game and acts like a game, but its just a simple image tagging algorithm which uses your brain instead of using image recogonition. Traditionally google has looked at the text inside "a href" to find out what the image is about. So the fact that google has come down to doing this could mean one of two things

  • It has a come across a bunch of images without any tags or meta data and is looking for ways to index them

  • It is testing ways to get human brain to do the job of cheap computers by giving them interesting incentives ( this is no different from how we train monkeys and pigeons to do a particular work). You get them to play a game, and reward them with a cookie at the end.

  • Or, as I suspect, google is testing an image recognition software and need human input to validate the images.


Either way, this is a very cool idea and I'm pretty sure everyone else will be doing the same thing in no time.

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