History
Luis von Ahn developed the ESP Game, a game in which two people were simultaneously given an image, with no way to communicate, other than knowing the matching label for each picture or the pass signal. The ESP Game had been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler and launched this service, as a beta on August 31, 2006.
Players noticed various subtle changes in the game over time. In the earliest months, through about November 2006, you could see your partner's guesses during play by mousing over the image. When the "congenita abuse" started (see below) you could see if your partner was using those terms, while the game was underway. The game was changed so that only at the end of the game could you click "see partner's guesses" and learn what he or she had typed. "Congenita abuse" was finally stopped by changes in the structure of the game in Feb. 2007 (see below). During the first few months of 2007 regular players grew to recognize a group of images that signified a "robot" partner, always with the same labels in the same order. This appeared to have changed as of about March 13, 2007. Suddenly most of the images seen were brand new, and the older images came with extensive off-limits lists.
By May 2007, there had been fundamental and substantial changes made to the game. Instead of 90 seconds, players had 2 minutes. Instead of 100 points per image, the score was varied to reward higher specificity. "Man" might get 50 points whereas "Bill Gates" might get 140 points. On August 7, 2007 another change was made. Instead of simply showing the point values of each match as the match occurs, the value of each match was shown next to the matching word at the end of the game. This made it much easier to see the exact value of specific versus general labeling. A further change was observed on October 15, 2007. The new version was put into place and then seemed to have been withdrawn. In the new version you saw only the image you were labeling, whereas in the old version the images were collected in the lower part of the screen as you played. Other changes were subtle; for example, the score was in green letters in the new version and red in the old. The most significant change was that the clock froze during the image change, and that time used to be essentially subtracted from the two minutes of play. The changes appeared to have gone into full effect on October 18, 2007.
In September 2011, Google announced it would discontinue a number of its products, including Google Image Labeler, Aardvark, Desktop, Fast Flip, and Google Pack. The game ended on September 16, 2011, to the discontent of many of its users.
Read more about this topic: Google Image Labeler
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