Everyone loves labeling things. As a designer I like things in the right place and I like to be able to get to those things quickly. To achieve this order a label seems to work, especially when I’m organising my video collection, Jam Jars, Facebook galleries and desktop folders.

Other label systems are not so efficient. If I was just searching the Internet to find a photograph of a elephant with some peanuts it will come up with a lot of unrelated images. When using image libraries such as Getty, iStockPhoto and Veer the such results are often very good. Internet search engines on the other hand aren’t organised by a photographer/company, they are searching under the users image file names.

This is all hopefully changing, I am talking about the Google Image Labeler. The perfect mix of competition and labeling. If you own a Dymo Label machine, a Badge-It or a collection of pens and over sized black markers then this is for you.

Luis Von Ahn a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh developed a game in 2003 that uses gamers to actively improve the web. When Google brought a license to the game they released ‘Google Image Labeler’ in 2006 and this helps to return better search results for online images. The Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) Game reveals the same image to two players and asks each to guess what the other person has written to describe it. If they agree, that word or phrase is then used to annotate the picture.

In the long run this should benefit the navigation and order of the Internet, but while doing this we can get the added bonus of a high score.

If we outline enough pictures of dogs, for example, the hope is that in the long-run the computer will know itself the outline of a dog.

Luis Von Ahn