Tag, You’re It
August 20, 2008
Shoe, heel, snake, eve, ahh! Photo by maintenancepic. Obtained via Flickr Creative Commons on 8/20/08
My friend Naomi just showed me a research project that Google is conducting, and it comes in the form of a simple, yet addictive little game. They’re calling it Google Image Labeler, and here’s how it works: You are paired with someone else in Googleland. You are both shown a series of images. You and your partner tag the images with whatever words come to mind. When you both assign the same word to an image, you move onto the next image and get points. You do this over and over (or in my case over and over and over and over) and the peeps with the most cumulative points are listed on the screen like top scorers in a video game. The images are often of poor quality and cover everything from portraiture to ads to nudie shots, so your brain’s got to be nimble.
Google states that the purpose of the labeler is to help “improve the relevance of image search for users.” Of course, this leaves me to wonder how the company plans on using the user generated tags to improve relevance. Research on query mapping, perhaps? Or folksonomy? Maybe Google is having its users generate metadata for them. Maybe a matched set of tags later becomes descriptor for the image. If so, this is genius. Why hire temps to do something that people will do for free? *sigh* I wish I was privy to Google’s search secrets. For now, I’ll just be content to tag their images.
