Game for Google's Benefit

I stumbled on to Google Image Labeler (Beta of course) the other day. It's a service offered by Google that lets the users tag images with appropriate keywords. What do you get out of it? Well, you get to have a little fun, and perhaps better search results.

Google says you need...
Just an interest in helping Google improve the relevance of image search results for users like yourself.

Google is smart. They've arranged the tagger in a way that makes it feel like a game. You get a partner and a time limit. You score points based on tags that match.

The points are just there to motivate the folks doing the tagging. The clock is there to get you tagging as many as you can, and perhaps they are just aiming at general classifying tags, so they don't want you spending a lot of time. The partner is probably there to make sure you can't muck up their database with a bunch of bad tags. Your partner is random and it seems that you'd need two malicious users with the same malicious tags to inject bad data in the system. I think they've effectively prevented that.

Even though I don't get anything out of it, I've still gone back a few times to play. I wish you could get a few cents here and there. It would be much like Amazon's Mechanical Turk system where you get small amounts of money to apply your human brain to problems that are easy to us, but hard for a computer.

What's next for Google Games? Spot the Spam? Add the ads? Appointment juggling?