8seek

In case you haven’t tried it yet, Google has come up with a new way to improve search results for their image search. Google Image Labeler turns the otherwise tedious task of labeling images into a multiplayer game.

You can try it out at first by just playing as a guest, but if you want your score to be saved, you need to be logged into your Google/Gmail account. Also, you can change your nick to anything you want, even someone else’s nick, but your score will be tied in to your account, so you won’t get a huge score by masquerading as the current points leader.

The game is rather simple. You and your partner start off with 90 seconds on the timer and are shown a thumbnail for an image in Google’s index. You both then begin entering labels you feel describe the image’s content, and if you both happen to enter the same one, another thumbnail appears. If you are both stumped on an image, you are able to pass. After your time runs out, points are tallied and if you wish to continue playing, another random player will be found. During the first day or two that Image Labeler was open, you could check the thumbnail’s URL to find out details about an image, but Google has since fixed this small “exploit.”

While playing I noticed that people don’t seem too concerned withmaking quality matches. Far too many times when a book cover appeared, players wouldn’t try to enter words from the title or author, they’d just stop at book. Or whenever a person with facial hair appeared they’d stick with beard even if the subject was easily recognizable. Once, I spent nearly all 90 seconds refusing to enter monkey when the picture was obviously of a chimp. Eventually, we matched on hairy. When the match was over and I was able to see what labels my partner had chosen, monkey and hairy were the only two he had attempted.

Google did plan for this, at least partially. There is an off-limits list of labels for each image. Once an image has been matched on one label, it becomes off-limits and you can no longer match on that particular term. This will, hopefully, force players to be somewhat more imaginative on future matching opportunities.

And in case you were wondering, at least at this time, the points you win serve no purpose beyond recognizing that you spend way too much time doing this. Which is a good thing, because if there was something useful you could do with them, the matches would be even more imprecise.

I play as 8seek, by the way. Just remember, if we happen to get matched up, I refuse to call an ape a monkey!

Guess I have while to go before I can make that leaderboard.