Towards Defensible Infinite Scale
His first was the ESP game wherein two users are instantly connected at random when visiting a website. They are both shown the same picture, such as a fish, and asked to guess what the other person is typing. As both are seeing the same image, they both naturally type words that have an affinity with said image in the hope of matching what their counterpart is typing. Through these crowdsourced human computation efforts, millions of people generated valuable metadata that google integrated into its image recognition & labelling products upon acquisition. ESP was bought in 2006, turned into Google Image Labeller, and closed in 2011.
His second was reCAPTCHA, estimated to generate over $200 million in revenue each year, and acquired for between $10 to $100m by Google in 2009. The idea being to prevent spam bots by distinguishing between human and automated access to websites. Initial versions were based on correctly reading text embedded in images to prove humanity and gain access. This crowdsourced human computation could also be used to digitize books that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. Upon acquisition this mass collaboration tool was directed towards decoding street view addresses as well as improving AI research.
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