Robert_Charlton - 6:33 am on Sep 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

A big part of this story for me is that Luis von Ahn, the co-founder of reCAPTCHA, is now working for Google.

Wonder how long it'll be until they take this beyond text captchas and use the newly available human computing power to improve Google Image Search through integrating something like this [images.google.com...] with reCAPTCHA.

von Ahn was, I believe, the inventor of the ESP Game, which is licensed by Google and is in fact used as the core of Google Image Labeler... so it's already integrated.

...newly available human computing power...

I'm guessing that von Ahn's expertise in this area is a good part of the reason that Google bought the company. von Ahn gave a Google TechTalk in July, 2006, on the subject of "Human Computation". It's available on Google Video....

Human Computation [video.google.com]
Google Video
51:31 TRT

The video struck me at the time I saw it as providing lots of clues about how Google looks at things...

anyone played Google Image Labeler game yet?
[webmasterworld.com...]

...I think that many of the principles of identification involved are being used by Google in lots of areas... in everything from Google Co-Op and Custom Search Engines to Google's assessment of link anchor text....