wheresrhys

About a year and a half ago I discovered a very addictive game Google were running called Image Labeler. You, and a randomly chosen other person playing the game simultaneously, were paired up and shown a series of images. for each image you had to keep typing in words to describe the image until one of yours matched your opponent’s, in which case you received some points; the more unusual/longer/less visual the word then in general you would get more points. I say opponent because although it’s the act of agreeing with them is what got you points, the game did generally involve a lot of mental castigation of your partner, e.g. “It’s a hat for chrissakes. Why on earth can’t you see it’s a hat. Just type in the word – H. A. T. What kind of a moron are you?!”… that sort of thing.

This surprisingly fun game had a purpose – to enable Google Images to tag images for searching, and the game is an ingenious way of doing so in my opinion (Google have long been known for genius programming, but devising Image Labeler took some impressive lateral thinking on their part).

I started writing this post as I presumed the game had finally borne visible fruit. It’s possible it’s been around for a while, but yesterday was the first time I noticed that Google Images now has options to filter by colour, by size and by a handful of key phrases (such as ‘photo’, ‘line drawing’).

On reflection, this may be almost wholly unrelated to the Image Labeler game – image size information has nothing to do with the game, and I reckon they probably have some colour detecting software to work out the prevalent colour in an image automatically.

But the game was, and still is, much fun.