Google's image labeller

At last, Google seemed to have sought human help to sort out Google images.

Google is asking surfers with time on their hands to help it categorize and label the images indexed by its search engine, building a database of knowledge about the contents of the images.

The company launched a new online game on Friday, Google Image Labeler, which it describes as "a fun way to help us organize all the images on the Web." In the game, two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, plucked at random from Google's search index, and given 90 seconds to suggest as many keywords or phrases as they can to describe it. They score points if any of their descriptions match.

Google's image search engine currently returns results based on captions and other text adjacent to images on Web pages, without reference to the content of the images themselves. The game will allow it to improve the performance of the search engine by returning results based on the players' descriptions of the images.

Find more on this in the PC World Magazine article