Google Image Labeler
November 22, 2006
I was doing some web searches and came across the Google Image Labeler (beta). Basically, you hit the button, Google matches you up with someone and you both get an image on your screen. Your job is to label the picture and when you and your partner get matches, you go onto the next picture. I guess it was made to help Google better refine their image searching capabilities and I find it quite addictive.
The funniest thing was that I was consistently matched up with someone who would always guess carcinoma for some reason. It’s actually kind of fun.
Filed under: Whatever
3 Comments
1. kristen&hellip | November 27, 2006 at 7:29 pm
you’re right – it’s addictive. and what’s with people guessing carcinoma and accretion and googley all the time?
2. ChuckfromWisc&hellip | December 16, 2006 at 10:03 am
ChuckfromWisc
Regarding the Image Labeler ‘game’, it seems somewhat obvious that the indiscriminate use of irregular words such as diphosphonate, congenita, accretion, googley, forbearance, carcinoma, bequeathing, etc. are not accidental. Therefore, if there is some purpose behind this use of rare words, what IS that purpose ?
I don’t subscribe to the spamming explanation, as Google surely knows what is happening, and could easily block these spammers and words long ago. It then appears that these incidences of junk words from our ‘partner’ occur with the blessing or design of Google.
If you notice, two things occur with regularity: as soon as an image appears, it says my ‘partner’ has already inputted 1-2 ‘guesses’. When you see those guesses later, they are usually words like diphosphonate or bequeathing….who can type THAT fast ?
Also, if you check your partner’s ‘guesses’ afterwards, AND there are these junk words, those words are always the first guesses and not the final guesses.
So, what does it all mean ? My own theory is that we are always or almost always playing a bot, OR, that the program itself inserts these ‘guesses’ for us without our knowledge. Either way, we are REACTING, and those reactions determine the way we play subsequent games. And THAT is the information that Google is REALLY trying to gather. After all, I’ve seen some of these same images for days; they should be quite well labeled already. ( Also, have you noticed that the images are for the most part very ‘hazy’ ? )
In the end, we’ll probably find that we were helping program some AI recognition function for GOOGLE, and we had FUN doing it !
PS Microsoft WORD spell-check does not recognize the 3rd grade words diphosphonate, congenita, or googley. Just when I was getting used to using them !
PPS I’m going to start inserting the word ‘miscellany’ ( just cut and paste ) into as many images that I can. If others do the same, maybe we can ‘teach’ the bot something.
3. alisha&hellip | December 16, 2006 at 11:09 am
Ahhh interesting. Yea It never really occurred to me that I might be playing a bot – but that makes sense. I wonder if the bot might be getting those words because the base image information – like when you upload an image and it is dscn56721.jpg or something like that – and it just grabs and repeats the same label as the first one it came across.
Interesting. Damn I wish I knew someone who worked at Google.