Monday, June 23, 2008

Google Image Labeler

There's a cute little game on Google called the Image Labeler. You're assigned a partner, and have 2 minutes to look at photos and type whatever comes to mind. If you match on a word, it saves it as a label used to mark that photo for future searches, gives you points based on the obscurity of the word, and moves to the next photo. It's a light game / puzzle that helps google find us photos more readily, and so, in theory, I'm happy to devote 10 minutes a day to a fairly enjoyable way to improve searches.

Problem is, everyone else who plays is a freakin' moron.
  • They all type really slowly. 9 times out of 10, I'll have made 3x the entries my partner has by game end.
  • They aren't very descriptive.
  • They can't spell. And/or they can't imagine that they could ever mistype.
  • And sometimes, they get really stupid. Here's some examples:
Example #1: There's a picture of waves crashing upon the rocky shore. I type rocks, shore, waves, crash, crest, surf, water, ocean, mist, beach, rocky. A minute and a half goes by, as I keep typing everything that appears in the picture, and every synonym I can think for them. In frustration I type "Ive entered 30 labels already". He never hits pass, he types only 4 labels. The game ends without a match on this, our second picture.
Partner's guesses: clouds, peak, pinnacle, point.
There are no clouds in the picture! They couldn't tell a shoreline from a mountaintop.

Example #2: There's a photo of a nazi rally, with hitler himself saluting the throngs of brownshirted swastika bearing thugs. I type nazi, nazis, hitler, brownshirts, soldiers, villains, army, germans, swastika, evil, rally, crowd, WW2, badguys, people.
Partner's guesses: soilders, march, guns, black and white, hill, people, man, men, boys, police, sun, lots of people
For the record, there was no sun visible, it was behind the "hill", which was really a building. The "police" were the freakin' gestapo.

Example #3: EDIT: NSFW example.

Example #4: The picture is a yellow arrow (with a zig-zag black stripe down the middle of it) emblazoned with words in purple saying "lowering your cholesterol". I type lowering your cholesterol, arrow, cholesterol, yellow, lowering, your, purple, black, zig zag, lowering your cholesterol.
Partner's guesses: lowering your cholesteral
And that's it, for over 30 seconds he sits there, no doubt wondering why I haven't typed the obvious phrase on the damn screen, and ignorant that he himself couldn't spell the word even when it was written there in front of him.

Example #5: The picture is Hadji. I'm all concerned with whether or not I'm spelling the names of the character's right, so I type in Haji, Hajji, Raji, Johny Quest, johnny quest, kid, tree, palm tree, turban, purple, india, cartoon
Partner's guesses: Terrorist.

I kid you not.

2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

That both makes me laugh and makes me sad.