Tag-tastic

Tagging is becoming a well known attribute for finding and browsing web content nowadays. You even see them displayed visually. On most user driven sites you are encouraged to add these tags to your contributions to help the findablity of your posts. This is great; sites get the users to do what would be hard monotonous work for an individual. I also like the way it increases awareness as to how we can add some meaning to yet another piece of data added to the colossal network, known as the t’interweb.

Tagging also helps to bridge the gap for search engines to index content other than text. Now we can add more value to things such as video, images and audio files through tagging.

What I am really trying to show you good people [who haven’t seen it already] is the Google Image Labeler game.

Google came up with a great idea to help improve their image search results through tagging… And who is best for the job? Joe Bloggs and a partner of course!

The outline is that you will label images in real-time with a partner. Once you both guess the same keyword for an image you score 100 points and move to another image. You can’t see what your partner suggests and you are on a countdown from 90 seconds.

Sounds like fun hey? I quiet like it, simple and slighty additctive. Give it a shot if you fancy.

In my opinion, image search has yet to move up to the level of text search. So fingers crossed this will help. I do wonder though what Google’s processes are for validating the labels people are putting in for the picture. There is an off-limits word list in the game. Perhaps this is to try and promote more accurate labels and not have them too generic. Time will tell if this does give their image search a helping hand. I am betting the people on this team at Google have a lot more working coming their way to control the influx of people labelling their images. Good luck!