A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems. The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around

A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems. The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those barriers. Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.