Google Image Labeler game

Google have licensed the ESP game, and made a version of it available as the Google Image Labeler.

The idea here is to label random images, at the same time as someone else, and when you both use the same label, you progress to the next image.

Its not just fun - the concept is that getting human descriptions of images like this can give improvements in image search, with an example search engine using this data at ESP Image Search.

Google's implementation of the game differs from the original in a number of ways, and frankly seems quite buggy:

• it avoids the need for Java
• the images are far too small - it uses the standard thumbnails from Google Image Search
• the layout of the screen is poor - the offlimits words are easily overlooked since they are too far away from the image
• the screen flickers horribly to update the time and the score - there is absolutely no need to redraw the unchanged score every second
• Once you have finished the game, most of the images used are shown for review, and a tool tip shows the guesses entered by your competitor. (You are not shown the last image, that you were working on at the time the game ends - which is a real shame when you had put a lot of effort in to describing it, and still not hit any matches).

The implementation has been done using the Google Web Toolkit.

Unfortunately, especially by using too small images where no detail can be made out, the best strategy for the game is to guess using lowest common denominator words - general terms such as man, woman, red, green etc. This is hardly adding any valuable data to the image above what the computer can determine automatically (colours are easily found, and face recognition is quite good at determining gender). The "offlimits" column can be used to correct for this a bit, but to do so is frustrating for the players - a far better idea would to simply use bigger images, so that there is more detail that can be described.

Lots of comments from Blogoscoped, TechCrunch, SearchEngineWatch, Slashdot, Geeking with Greg.

(It looks likely that the domain names "Google Image Tagger" which were registered recently are associated with this game, but once again, Google has steered clear of the word "tag", instead finally deciding on using the word "label" instead).

Update:Looking at the HTML file, the internal name of this is com.google.image.tagger.ImageTagger, so the change from Tagger to Labeler looks to be a fairly last minute decision.