Google Mechanical Turk

Posted: 5/11/2019 Updated: 8/2/2019, 6/10/2019/6/7/2019, 6/6/2019

Update Of 8/2/2019

I don’t think I mentioned it before, but I am a paying customer of Google Drive for about 2 years or longer and I log into Google Scholar with my Google account. Despite that Google has the freaking audacity to ask me whether I am a robot. This utter nonsense is literally pissing me off!

Meanwhile, I discovered that Microsoft Academic is not such a bad substitute for Google Scholar. It also has its quirks, but also its strength, e.g. it splits citation counts by publication. Long live competition!

Update Of 6/10/2019

Image classification tasks (Google Mechanical Turk without pay) now also effective when using incognito window in Google Chrome Browser. EXTREMELY ANNOYING!

Update Of 6/7/2019

I may have found a workaround this issue: When using the incognito window in Google Chrome browser, you are apparently not prompted to participate in the Google Mechanical Turk assignments!

Hooray!

Update Of 6/6/2019

Google Scholar is now inundating me every day several times with their image classification tasks!

And if you refuse to play along nicely, Google will not budge!

EXTREMELY ANNOYING!

Original Post

I assume many readers are familiar with the Amazon Mechanical Turk. According to Amazon: “.... a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs ”. At least you get paid, if little for your work.

Google has, to my knowledge, recently introduced what I call the Google Mechanical Turk. Google Scholar will subject you to image classification tasks if you query Google Scholar frequently for scholars or research papers. Google claims it is a security measure to foil bots. Unfortunately, you do not get paid for this work at all! Shame on Google!

P.S.

As a teenager I saw the Mechanical Turk (a.k.a. Chess Automaton) in a encyclopedia of historical technology. For its time, it was a very impressive achievement, but it was a magician’s trick. 

More famous (less magic and more mechanical engineering) were perhaps the Jaquet-Droz’s Three Automatons (see e.g. here.