Exceptional Internet

Here’s a novel idea.  Google want you to be able to search images for their content. The problem is search spiders aren’t equipped with the necessary organic brainpower that allows them to recognise the content of all the jpegs littering the web-o-sphere, and even the most advanced computer intelligence wouldn’t have the cognitive processes that would enable photographs to be catalogued.

Google therefore needs human editors to classify their images. But with the ‘net growing so quickly this is a mammoth task.

“I know” thought some genius at Google, let’s make a little game of it that people on the interweb will want to play and they can catlogue these images for us. The result - Google Image Labeler -  a worryingly addictive experience in which 2 random intenet users are paired up anonymously and shown the same set of images to which they apply descriptive keywords. If they match on a keyword then they are given points and shown a new image. The idea is to score as many points as possible in 2 minutes, and a high score table shows how you are doing against the rest of the world.

It’s great fun and addictive trying to beat your score, but this is where Google might have a little problem with this approach. By making it competitive you naturally find yourself shying away from the more accurate descriptions in order to get a match and move on meaning that the data collected by the big G by this method will very lower common denominator and ultimately of less use to searchers.

For example a picture of a Ferrari Enzo is unlikely to be tagged as such, instead phrases like “red car” will be thrown in with the people who recognise the make and model not bothering to type it as it is unlikely to match. Fine when this is converted to search data but how are people looking for pictures of a Ferrari Enzo going to know that they need to search for “red car”…of course this data will only form part of Google’s image search algorythm so the problem won’t be as bad as all that (I’m guessing non-partner-matched keywords will also be used and that filenames and alt text will be heavily weighted) and this really does show Google thinking outside the box in order to encourage real people to enhance the quality of it’s search data.

It’s got to be worth 2 minutes of your life.

Filed under: Online Entertainment, Using The Web