Google really does come up with some interesting things.
I was trawling through my google sitemap data today and I noticed a new menu item. Google Enhanced Image Search.
To summarise, it sounds like google has quite a few things in the pipeline to liven up their image search. The first of these, is google image labeler.
Basically, what happens is that you have a certain amount of time (about two minutes) and it’s like a gameshow. You get partnered with someone else, and as images appear, you have to use words to describe them.
If you both pick the same word, then it’s considered a “match” and you get points (which aren’t useful for anything as far as I can tell).
It’s fairly addictive, and an interesting exercise in psychology.
Let’s take this image that came up in my last round:
Now, my first thought was “I wonder whether my partner is from the US.”
I decided I’d kick off with a couple of fairly politically correct answers and try “muslim” and “arabic”.
“Hmm, no match. Ok, let’s try the American response.”
“Terrorist.”
Still no match. At this point with every picture, you start to try and think of the lowest, most generic attribute of the image. “Red”. Matched!
As it turns out, my partner guessed; diphosphonate, entrepreneurialism and red.
So, what do I think of the system? It seems pretty cool, but what always happen is that you drop to guessing extremely generic terms just to get a match. For instance a picture of a city map will always be matched as “map” which isn’t going to help anyone searching for ‘Auckland Map’. And it extends to anything, an iconic Indian building will match as “building” and a famous painting may match as “painting”, “art” of “person”.
I think this idea has it’s merits, but detailed categorising, and matching of people with categories that they have knowledge of would make the system a lot more useful.
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4 comments
db says:
October 30, 2006 at 8:56 pm (UTC 13 )
Yeah, I remember playing this somewhere a few years ago and documenting it on the nocents forum. (Which I think has gone now?). Me and Ray synchronised over MSN and took it to the cleaners with “a”. Millions and millions of points were heaped upon us. Good times. Possibly didn’t help them much with their image index, though.
Diphosphonate. That’s just genius, that is.
Pete says:
October 30, 2006 at 9:44 pm (UTC 13 )
Ha! That made me chuckle.
Yeah, I saw diphosphonate and a few other odd words a few times, so, as with all internet activities I imagine, I think there’s some sort of automation or spamming going on.
Philipp Lenssen says:
November 9, 2006 at 9:35 am (UTC 13 )
Yeah, I noticed something similar recently. You really gotta dumb it down to score high sometimes
Pete says:
November 9, 2006 at 9:51 am (UTC 13 )
Yeah, but it can be quite fulfilling when you get accurate matches (non dumbed down) with a random stranger.