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Google Image Labeler

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat Sep 02, 2006 03:56 PM
from the counting-on-ocd dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
vandalman writes to tell us that Google is betting on the obsessive compulsive need for many users to see big numbers next to their name with a new beta service called Google Image Labeler. From the description: "You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session."
+ -
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[+] News: Games With A Purpose Help With Tasks That Tax Computers 61 comments
Falkkin writes "Luis von Ahn and his team at Carnegie Mellon University have launched GWAP, a new web site for 'Games With A Purpose.' By playing these online games, humans help provide data for problems that are hard for computers to solve, such as computer vision and sound classification. Slashdot has previously covered other human computation projects by Dr. von Ahn, including the ESP Game and reCAPTCHA. The new web site contains a re-vamping of the ESP Game as well as four completely new games." (Falkkin also points to an AP story on GWAP and to coverage at the BBC.)
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  • Too small pics (Score:5, Insightful)

    by avij (105924) on Saturday September 02 2006, @03:57PM (#16030639) Homepage
    This is indeed a creative way to enhance the search results. Some of the pictures could be a little bit larger though.. Or some kind of a mouse-over which shows a larger picture.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by foniksonik (573572)
      yep, they should use DomTT [mojavelinux.com] (anonymous plug)

          • Re:GAMES (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Pahroza (24427) on Sunday September 03 2006, @02:28AM (#16031911)
            While I agree that there should be some bonus time for doing well, I can understand that they don't want to give you too much feedback. The way I see it, the point is to get a good cross section of what people would label an image, not find the 2 people that see each image the same way. If you've got people doing really well together, then they obviously see things the same, and it is probably time to pair you up with someone else.

      • Re:More like a creative way to get work for free.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ultranova (717540) on Sunday September 03 2006, @05:02AM (#16032065)

        Seems kinda sinister to me. Personally I would like to gather the rewards for my own efforts, not allow some megacorp to do so.

        Careful, now; that attitude makes you sound like a communist. It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts, this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.

        Your desire to gain the benefit from your own work is, therefore, completely un-American. The capitalist way of doing things is that you do the work, the investors get the profits, and you get to compete with the Indians for who can survive with the lowest wage. Since India has a much lower cost of living, you're going to lose. Since your economy is bleeding money to India, the buying power of the people of your country is going to shrink, making it more neccessary for corporations to try to cut costs by hiring more Indians, and the situation is going to get worse and worse.

        Sure makes you glad to live in a capitalist country, doesn't it ? And sure makes this post likely to be modded down by free-market fundamentalists who don't quite understand that communism ("people should own the means of production they use, and if a particular means needs more than one people to operate, then those people should own it communally") is not exclusive to free market ("everyone is free to produce what they want and trade with whoever they will").

        Mod me down, but I'm still right.

        • INSIGHTFUL???? wtf... (Score:5, Informative)

          by UbuntuDupe (970646) on Sunday September 03 2006, @03:52PM (#16034030) Journal
          I'm not upset that you're criticizing capitalism, but that you're doing it out of ignorance:

          It is the basic idea behind the Communist Manifesto: workers should reap the benefits of their own efforts,

          No, communists believe that people should be paid "according to need" (remember that "from each according to ability ..." line?), whether or not their efforts produced any benefit. Whether or not a given worker is completely useless.

          this requires that everyone owns the means of production he uses, and since a factory can't be operated by a single person alone, it should be owned communally by all the workers working there who can then share the profits between themselves instead of having a rich capitalist - megacorp in these times - pocket them.

          Again, the whole "corporations get all the profits". Well, they also get all the losses. Do you want to wait to get paid until the corporation has paid back all of its expenses? Do you want to refund wages when it sinks without earning a profit? If you think your employer is going to get rich, a neat trick is to "buy shares". In a worker-owned factory, every worker's ENTIRE investments are in the factory. If ANYTHING goes wrong -- over which they have no control -- they lose their job and their savings. Nice deal, huh? This is why people don't own their workplaces. It makes much more sense for them to trade their share in their workplace and buy shares in a broad array of businesses so as to insure themselves against the financial risk.

          Contrary to what you have said above, it is possible to have worker-owned factories under capitalism. They're actually heavily tax favored. Of all the enormous unions out there, any one of them could have pooled members funds and performed a hostile takeover (look it up) of any existing corporation. The reason they don't is, a) the financial risk above, and b) they all realize that what would happen is that for a few days they would merrily "pay themselves" a "fair wage" until they realized they could just pay the market rate for other people to do it.

          Please, cure your ignorance.

  • looks good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Saturday September 02 2006, @03:59PM (#16030642) Homepage Journal
    its just taken me 4 minutes to accumulate ~1000 points, there are people who have accumulated 190000 points.

    Thats playing the google game solidly for around 12 hours (less if they are good).

    Congrats to those people!

    As for myself, I found the image sizes too small, but I suppose we are basing the keywords on first impressions and are expected to come from the image search.

    I found myself squinting to see what it was meant to be and wasting time, even if it was just 2x larger (scaled would do, no real need for more data) I would spend time there, its actually quite fun especially since you are aiming to get more than your random competitor.

  • Oh boy, points (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lurker412 (706164) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:00PM (#16030646)
    And those points will get me what?

  • Slender Neck Pr0n (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rakshasa Taisab (244699) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:02PM (#16030651) Homepage
    I wonder, will they provide an option for only labeling porn images?

  • The ESP Game (Score:4, Informative)

    by JeffAMcGee (950264) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:04PM (#16030657) Homepage
    It looks like google just created a clone of the ESP Game [espgame.org].

  • I tried it. (Score:5, Funny)

    by celardore (844933) <celardore@gmail.com> on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:10PM (#16030684) Homepage
    I went to this site. I was paired with someone, then presented with my image. It was one I recognised, the 'broken image link' glyph. I tagged 'broken' and '404' among other things.
    I didn't get one tag in common with my partner!

  • Content Based Image Retrieval (Score:3, Informative)

    by d2_m_viant (811261) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:11PM (#16030691)
    Doesn't Google already use Content Based Image Retrieval [wikipedia.org] anyways for their image search? If so, why would they need to attach a bunch of metadata to each image?

    • Re:Content Based Image Retrieval (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sparkz (146432) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:27PM (#16030749) Homepage
      At the end, it says "Thanks for your contribution. It will help us improve the relevance of image search results so that you and other Google users can quickly and easily find the results you're looking for." Which is better at recognising what's in a picture? A human, who can say "oh look, that's Natalie Portman pouring hot grits down her pants", not a computer which will just say "a person" at best.

  • Yipee! (Score:4, Funny)

    by timeOday (582209) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:14PM (#16030707)
    It's like the $20,000 Pyramid [super70s.com] gameshow, but without the $20,000.

  • labels: lame free work scheme (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rakerman (409507) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:20PM (#16030723) Homepage Journal
    Ah, precious Google points, the currency of the future.
    Until then, it's like Amazon Mechanical Turk, except you work for free.

    On a completely unrelated note, this would be a handy service for spammers to get their CAPTCHAs solved for free.
  • I think it's pretty ridiculous, but I do find myself competing for ranking in the system. It's human nature to be competitive, and I know from experience that I'm competitive in even some rather ridiculous circumstances.

    It's actually a lot more fun (and social) than many computer games I've played, because it's not just about finding applicable labels, but labels that you think the other person will guess. Also looking at what kinds of things matched before gives you some feeling of who you're partnered with, and what words they will likely use.

    To me this looks like a winner, for Google at least. And you know what? If this is entertainment, and it helps people find the information they need, I don't mind doing "work" for Google, not one bit. So far they've been very good to me, and as long as that keeps up, I can't feel bad for supporting them.

  • Eyes of the Calculor (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Buzz_Litebeer (539463) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:41PM (#16030786) Journal
    Google is now harnessing a distributed operating system, you and me. They use games to get us to essentially program for them and reduce error by having multiple people do the same task and use what answers come out.

    Very clever. Of course this was done by Amazon as well I think and I dont know what has come of that effort.

    But it really means that they are using the processing power of people to avoid having to create artificial intelligence. And why not? Just use real intelligence from people and let them enjoy it by thinking it is a game!

  • Definitely BETA! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Selanit (192811) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:45PM (#16030803)
    This is quite definitely beta stuff. Maybe alpha. In particular, the "pass" system seems borked. I came across an image that was unidentifiable, and clicked "Pass." It said, "Waiting on your partner to pass." Long, dreary seconds ticked by, and then it said "Your partner wants to pass." ... ???

    Why yes! I'd be glad to agree with my partner's request, except that I ALREADY SENT a pass request, and now the button is greyed out.

    This happened several times. The first time, we were almost done anyway, so I let the timer expire. Guess what? If time expires while in this confused "we both want to pass but the system isn't working" state, then it doesn't actually complete the sequence (ie redirect you to the "completion" page). It just sits there, leaving you no choice but to manually return to the beginning page.

    Also, people are dumb. I got a picture of a mountain road bordered by pine trees with a large cloud on the horizon. So over the course of about twenty seconds I suggested:

    - Cloud
    - Mountain
    - Road
    - Trees
    - Pine Trees
    - Thunderhead
    - Cars
    - Car

    My partner still hadn't suggested any terms. So I suggested:

    - nincompoop
    - light weight
    - My partner is an idiot

    None of those matched, thankfully.

  • Had a play with this yesterday (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Hortensia Patel (101296) on Saturday September 02 2006, @04:58PM (#16030849)
    And it's kinda flawed at the moment. Seems to hang a lot for one thing, but the main problem is that the images are so ridiculously tiny. Google aren't going to get useful tags that way - most of the points of agreement end up being words like "man" or "people" or "building". It's frustrating, because often it's clearly a specific building, maybe even with a sign saying EXACTLY what it is, except that the text is half a pixel high.

    That said, the end-of-game summary is an illuminating (and terrifying) revelation of just how bad some people's spelling is.

  • Finding a decent partner is hard (Score:5, Interesting)

    by osgeek (239988) on Saturday September 02 2006, @05:07PM (#16030876) Homepage
    I played about 10 times. 9 out of the 10 times, I got really lame people who mostly wanted to pass. 1 time, I got someone who was actually mentally engaged in the game and we got 900 points. It would be fun to do better, but if finding a non-retarded partner is typically such a pain, I'm not sure if it's worth it.

      • Re:Perhaps you don't understand the game. (Score:4, Funny)

        by Jeremi (14640) on Saturday September 02 2006, @08:12PM (#16031323) Homepage
        Maybe some of those "retarded" people that you talk about have realized that "points" are meaningless, and are trying to send you a message


        Of course! Because people who think Google's game is a complete waste of time would definitely want to spend several hours of their precious time playing that game as badly as possible, in order to send a "message" about time-wasting to some anonymous person who they know nothing about and will never meet or even talk to. It all makes sense now, thanks for clearing that up. :^P


        Actually, I've got an alternate explanation: The server was malfunctioning under the load of too many people trying to play it at once.

  • First step (Score:5, Funny)

    by while (-1) sleep (1) (903796) on Saturday September 02 2006, @05:10PM (#16030886)
    This is just Google struggling to become self-aware. No need for concern...

    --

    I am, therefore I should think

  • Buggy as hell (Score:5, Informative)

    by ArsenneLupin (766289) on Saturday September 02 2006, @05:22PM (#16030918)
    Dunno if it's the slashdot effect, or just poor programming, but the site is buggy as hell:
    • Often shows broken images
    • If you try to login, it pretends you've disabled cookies, even if they are enabled
    • When it says "Your partner has asked to pass", and you click on pass, it goes to "Waiting on your partner to pass.", even though he already has passed.

  • Lowest common denominator (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dan East (318230) on Saturday September 02 2006, @08:32PM (#16031368) Homepage
    Lowest common denominator, that's the quality of results they'll end up with. I might see a picture and label it "bird", where my partner, being an ornithologist, labels its exact scientific and common names. Until he enters "bird" we don't get a match.

    Dan East

  • Strangely useful (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Maïdjeurtam (101190) on Saturday September 02 2006, @09:45PM (#16031524) Homepage Journal
    As a non-native English speaker, this game has allowed me to learn new words, and how people from other cultures see a same image. I see hands where others see labor, that kind of think.

    If you haven't tried it, try it: you'll learn things about how people perceive pictures. And if your random partner has the same thinking schemes than you, you'll get points!

    Google points worth nothing, but that's Google points. Yeah.

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