Type "Laughing" into Flickr and look at the first page of results. Only 15 of the 24 pictures tagged with the keyword "laughing" actually have a human (or cartoon or other humanoid or animal close-up enough to be capable of looking like it's laughing), and of those 15, only 4 of them are actually pictures of someone laughing.

If I showed you the results, would you be able to guess the keyword? I doubt it.

(Yahoo and Google do somewhat better, Yahoo with 13/24 humanoid and of those 10 are actually laughing. Google had 19 of the 20 actually laughing - though most are cartoons - pretty good!)

Search Engine sites should offer a "game" where they pick a common keyword and show you the first 24 pictures of it. If you can guess the keyword, you earn "points" to later redeem for useless prizes. If not, then the site starts showing variations of that same search to other users (randomly selecting subsets of those pictures), and eventually deduces which pictures were INACCURATELY labeled. The search site then removes those tags from those images.

Thank you.
-- phundug, Apr 09 2008

Not Quite the Same http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Google uses this game to improve their image search. [craigts, Apr 09 2008]

fastr http://randomchaos.com/games/fastr/
Fairly close. Gradually reveals flickr images until you guess right; the quicker you guess, the higher your score. I don't think the results are used for anything. Pretty fun. [jutta, Apr 09 2008]

Image Quiz http://www.gamesfor...com/game/imagequiz/
Fun little game with same general idea, though not associated with any search engine. [Ratwoman, Apr 10 2008]

Hm. Only complication I see is that some sites (Flickr being one) are constantly updated with new uploads, which may throw the selection for the same keyword.
-- DrCurry, Apr 09 2008


I believe that Google's image labeller game may actually be damaging the quality of their searches. For example, if they show this:

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/|

then the players are likely to label it "bird", even if it's a useless blot that image searchers WILL NOT want to see in their search results. But, now that the imagelabeler players agreed that it's a bird, it is going to appear in every search for "Bird", even though there are far better bird pictures available on the Net.

(To combat this, I have also proposed "Volunteer To Rate Your Search Results..." above.)
-- phundug, Apr 09 2008


Games like this are very baked but I can't find a link. Rather expected [jutta] to link to it. Do you remember that guy a few years back, he was very smart, big education he made this game:

Two people look at a picture you both say what you see if you get it right you both get points. The laughing face gets one point but then you go on to find the tree in the background, you get points for naming that to but not for naming it first, it has lower priority so the computer can learn to recognise. A lot of people played these games it was popular for a while. Something to do with connecting the minds of people across the globe to create one big supercomputer with humans as chips. Does this make sense to anyone or am I just talking out of my arse again?
-- zeno, Apr 10 2008



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