Cute idea, but will it work?

You have to hand it to Google, they are a smart bunch. I noticed a new link on the Google images search page today and figured I check it out. It was a link to try the new "Google Image Labeler".

So what does it do. Well, it's almost like a guessing game. You are paired with a hidden partner and shown the same image and you have to give it a descriptive label. You continue to do this until you both use the same label and then it's on to the next image. This keeps going to 90 seconds and you get points for each match. The points are absolutely worthless and have no meaning whatsoever. So what's the point of all this?

Well it's a really cute and almost fun way of helping Google get better results on image searches. See as I understand it Google would use the accompanying text to identify the image. Which, depending on the author of the web page, may or may not be appropriate. So with this game Google is getting people to try do the labeling for them in the hopes of making it more accurately reflect the image.

The more I think about it though the less I think this will work. After all the people are going to go for the most obvious and easiest to spell word for the image. As a result if you search for "men" you will probably get about 2o billion hits. But search for something more specific, like "paleontologist" and you probably won't get much.

All the same it is a fun little matching game and it does show a very creative idea that Google is exploring. And who knows, it just might work...unless the word is hard to spell and I'm your partner, at which point I suggest that we just use the word "men" for anything challenging.