Google has launched a little game called the Google Image Labeler. In it, you help Google tag all the images in its Image Search database by pairing with a random person.
You are both shown a random image and asked to submit labels, or tags, for the image. Once you both use the same tag, it is accepted and you move on to the next image. You can also choose to pass on an image if it isn’t working out.
The game is an interesting idea, to say the least. Google has a huge image index, and images are notoriously hard on machines, so any means of helping catalog them is a good thing. BuyGoogle has some good perspective on the reasoning and the man behind the game. I like the idea of using any sort of fun, even if it is bored fun, to help make search better.
That said, the game suffers from a major flaw: It uses thumbnails, instead of full-size images, during the game. That means that detail is nearly impossible to pull out. Half the images are just too tiny and meaningless to understand, and that results in a hell of a lot of passed images. I’m not going to squint at a tiny thumbnail and try to figure out if the car is a Ford or a Chevy, and being able to tell the details in an image is what would make a search engine great. I realize Google has had many legal issues surrounding Image Search, but they need to find a way to include full-size images if they want to get better tags than “car” for every damn car in the database.
There’s no long tail for this game.
Check out Philipp and John Battelle’s commentary.
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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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