Google is Looking for a few (Million) Good Men and Women

A recent article at PC World.Com informs a world hungry for the latest news about the world's favorite search engine that Google has decided to let its millions of loyal users help it organize all the billions of images it has in its index. Question: If there are approximately 9-10 pages of content on the Web, how many images do you think there are on the Web? 20-40-80-100 billion? I have no idea.

Google has come up with a pretty clever idea to entice its millions of daily Googlers to index its images--a game it just launched-- Google Image Labeler. Two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, chosen at random from its index, and given ninety seconds to suggest all the keywords or phrases they can think of to describe it. If any of the two players' desciptions match, they score points.

In 2003 Luis von Ahn and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a game named ESP to tag its image base. The Google Image Labeler game is partially based on ESP. Would you like to guess how long it will take millions of Googlers to label all those billions, trillions, gadzillions of images?? Once again, I don't have a clue, but I'll bet it won't be finished until long after I am pushing up daisies.

If you'd like to play the game, follow this link.