Recently when I was searching for some images on Google Images, I stumbled upon a small text link in an almost unobvious location (the right hand corner) that went something like this “New! Google Image Labeller”. Curious about what it was, I clicked on it. and here’s what I was welcomed by…

“Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.”

Seems like Google has also chosen the crowdsourcing path. With Google Image Labeller, Google is trying to get its users to add ‘tags’ to images that show up on Google images. This way, the ‘searchability’ of an image goes up as it now gets more meta elements associated with it.

And all this, in the format of a fun game.. that’s where it gets interesting.

When you enter Image Labeller, the system looks for an online ‘partner’ who will tag the same images along with you. Once the system has found another person who is online on Image Labeller, the labeling begins! Both the users are shown the same image on their individual screens and they are asked to provide tags for the image they see on the screen. Each user can enter as many tags as he or she wants. The goal is to enter a tag for the image that matches with the tag of the partner user. When the tags of both the partners match, points are given to both users. There is also a 2 minute countdown time for each session before which the partners have to tag as many images as possible. The more tries it takes to get a matchin tag the lesser the points the team gets. If you are stuck, you can press the ‘Pass’ button and you can wait for your partner to pass as well so you can move onto tagging the next image. Each user can see basic information about the actions of the other user (how many tags entered, whether the partner would like to pass, etc) except for what tags he or she is coming up with since this is what needs to be guessed and matched.

Here are a few screenshots:

When you press ‘Begin’, Google searches for another person who is online and can label with you

After te partner is chosen, you are shown your first image and you can start labeling

You can see you partners actions below the text box.

At the end of the game, you get to see your final score of the 2 minute game.

Reminds me of Tagcow, a service that magically tags photos. Here’s how Tagcow works (description as provided on):

Tagcow works by sucking in images from Flickr or a personal photo folder. It then pushes those images to Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, where a Mechanical Turk worker tags them and resubmits them back to Tagcow. The images go through a quality assurance process to make sure the tags make sense before posted again on Flickr or the Tagcow site.

So.. if you’re getting bored at office and no particular grudge against Google.. go ahead .. try Google Image Labeler, partner with a random virtual user and compete with other teams!

This post is tagged crowdsourcing, Google