Free Outsourcing? Wicked Google! – That’s what came to my mind first when i read about this product.(It’s an old one from Google though)

Google Image Labeller is a product launched by Google where in it gives you an “oppurtunity” to label the images indexed on google.

While you start it here- Google plays it more like a game. You get a partner who would have already tagged or labelled a few images, which is now thrown at you. Now you get the chance to label the image, within a particular amount of time. And if yours and your partners labels match – you win points to your credit.

No you can’t get a gift hamper from Google or ebay with those points, but hey your name flashes on the homepage if you made it huge.

Well, guess what – Isn’t google trying to get their enormous images database tagged/keyworded for free with this silly game? Huh..huh?
When stock photo agencies worldwide are outsourcing such kind of keywording/labelling work , Google plays it smart by taking advantage of the folksonomy effect.

Let’s also think about it another way – what if the flickr fans(or any anti-google guy) want to corrupt the algorithm? All they have to do is – Go to google images, sign in as a guest and start labelling images wrongly with the most in appropriate tags. That’s a cool way to play it back on Google! I’m only talking about a possiblity here. Google Images – I don’t want to corrupt your algorithm but could you make some arrangement so that when i search for a cat on your engine, i get a cat’s image and not a flower’s image – in the future that is?