Enhancing image searches - with public help

Enhancing image searches - with public help

A project at the Carnegie Mellon University is enlisting public help to tag images on the web to improve image findability. Tools such as Flickr made the idea of tagging images popular. When an image is searched, the search criteria is matched with the attributes associated with the image, and results displayed to the user. While Google uses automated means with some degree of success, the ESP Project allows the public to tag images via a game. People have fun playing the game, while tagging the images. The prototype search on their site does an incredible job of finding images that are a very good match of the search criteria. Play the game here. Search images here.

PowerSnap, the product I mentioned earlier on the blog, allows the user to tag images and then generates web-sites/slideshows by applying rules defined by the user on these tags.