A fun game

Leave it to the folks at Google to come up with a way that gets people to help develope one of their core technologies free of charge, all the while letting people have fun at the same time. And they make you feel good about wasting away the hours into the middle of the night, by calling it something benign and innocuous, like, "Google Image Labeler."

The premise for this game is quite simple:

You'll be randomly paired with a partner who's online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner's label, you'll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You'll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you've seen and the websites where those images were found. And we'll show you the points you've earned throughout the session.

So what does the average Internet surfer get out of it? A fun, amusing way to waste some time in moments of boredom. And what does Google get out of it? Well, according to their thank-you message (which is displayed at the end of each two-minute round):

It will help us improve the relevance of image search results so that you and other Google users can quickly and easily find the results you're looking for.

So give it a whirl. You just might find it entertaining. And try to beat my currect best: 1,740 points. :-)