Google Image Labeler

Google Image Labeler

After some deterioration in Google's Image Search results, Google has started a new feature called Google Image Labeler. The feature aims at improving the quality of the image search results.

This web application has been designed quite well. It encourages the users to help Google by playing a very interesting game. You start off by selecting a name for yourself (or you can leave it as guest). When you click the "Begin as .." button, it will search for a partner for you who is also currently online and ready to play the game.

The game starts off by giving an image to you and your partner. Both of you will have to suggest tags for the displayed image. Different tags hold different points. On the right hand side of the page, you can find two columns - "off-limits" and "my labels". The off-limits columns suggests words (if any) that are not allowed for that particular image and will not be counted as a valid entry by you (or your partner). The words suggested by you are shown under the my label column.
You will be shown the next picture if a particular label suggested by both you and your partner matches. Or, you can press the Pass button at the top to skip that picture.
Just above the image is the status indicator which shows the number of labels that have been suggested by your partner. If you press the skip button, then it will show the status as "Waiting on your partner to pass." or a request from your partner for skipping the image, if your partner wishes to skip it.
If your partner also agrees to pass that image, the next image will be displayed.

The time limit to play this game is 2 minutes. You have to try to label as many pictures as possible within this limit. When the game ends, you will be shown all the images that were shown to you and your partner along with the labels suggested for each by your partner.

Points are calculated depending on the label that matches with your partner's and its relevance to the image. If you've logged into your Google account, then those points will be added to your account, and the next time you play this game, you will start from the points where you left last.
Don't know what the points will be used for in future.. :)

As per the logical perspective of this game, the plan is quite well thought of. If a user is left to himself to label a picture, then it is highly possible to get a set of incorrect data. However, if two people, randomly chosen over the internet, are selected to do this job, then they would definitely give a relevant label. The users would be forced to think of a generic word to describe the given image in order to match their label with their partner, making it possible for both to move on to the next image.

However, users tend to give labels like image or picture when they are unable to decide what exactly a picture is showing or when they are not able to arrive at a common label to describe the image. This, in the long run, can hamper the information of the image. But, it seems that the suggested labels are reviewed and the least descriptive (or the most common) ones are marked as off-limit so that the users can think of some better labels. Considering the variety of users and their knowledge about the depiction of the image, things would certainly go on the right track.