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If you're looking to waste some time online and are in a place where you don't feel comfortable surfing for porn, such as your desk at work, at a school computer lab or jumping on a wifi connection while your waiting for a priest to absolve your sins at a church confessional, then perhaps you should take a look at Google Image Labeler.

Having launched in beta in August of last year and having undergone several modifications since then, the web application is a game to help Google better contextualize the results for its image searches. You are paired up at random with another user. With two minutes on the clock you are shown one image at a time and you both type in words that describe the picture. You don't know what your partner is writing but if you match descriptions, you get points and move onto the next image. To make it more difficult, there are "off-limits" words which previous pairs agreed upon for the photo. But you can suggest passing on a given image if the two of you aren't seeing eye to eye.

When it comes to your suggestions, the more descriptive the better as it will get you more points. For example, if you and your partner agree on "Meg Ryan" you'd score more points than if you both simply put "woman." Of course, if it's really a picture of Melanie Griffith, it's too late as the search term has already been added to the database. But at least you got the points.

Unfortunately, this is what makes Image Labeler really just an online game and not anything bigger. I realize the purpose is to improve Google's image search engine, by expanding the amount of tags related to a given image. In practice, though, it seems to have some problems.

Granted, the system of agreement by random pairs lessens the chance of people actively sabotaging searches with false terms, like how Stephen Colbert had his fans bombard Wikipedia with made-up entries. (Though if I'm ever shown a picture of George W. Bush, I'll use all my psychic powers to force my partner to also type "miserable failure.")

Foul-ups will still occur. And they could theoretically mess up future Google searches. The players could, for example, confuse two similar-looking actors, or share a mutual cultural ignorance, such as agreeing on the search term "Chinese" for a Japanese woman because "Asian" was already taken. It doesn't help matters that the images appear to be the thumbnails from searches blown up, making them pixelated and often hard to make out. (It's odd, considering at the end of the game it provides links to all the full-size images.)

So even if you aren't technically wrong in your guesses, they're often quite vague. For example, at one point I was looking a picture that I knew was of Jessica Alba because I'd seen it before. But my partner obviously couldn't make it out and so all we could agree on was "nude." (She was lying on a bed unclothed, holding white bed sheets to her body.)

But in general, partially because people try to type in answers as fast as possible, a lot of the photos first matches are useless search terms, such as man, woman, water, blue, building and shirt. If we could actually see the real pictures, it might make exercise a little less futile.

Still, the main purpose for using thsi is to procrastinate and it's certainly a fun way to do it. It's as least as entertaining as the various machinations of Penguin Baseball and that weird game where you throw a bikini clad woman around with the mouse as she falls through an endless sea of bubbles.

About G4 in Canada
G4 Canada (formerly TechTV Canada) launched in September 2001. G4 is the one and only television station that is plugged into every dimension of games, gear, gadgets and gigabytes. Owned Rogers Media Inc., the channel airs more than 24 original series. G4 is available on digital cable and satellite. For more information, see www.g4tv.ca.

Tech News on G4

'Help out Google index pics online

October 22, 2007

By Adam Swimmer - G4 Canada