It is a good idea and Google uses games and tools to gather data on a fairly regular basis. Some examples: -GOOG-411 (voice recognition) -Ingress (location da

It is a good idea and Google uses games and tools to gather data on a fairly regular basis. Some examples: -GOOG-411 (voice recognition) -Ingress (location data) -Google Image Labeler (image identification) -Recaptcha (book / streetview ocr) I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones off the top of my head. EDIT: They obviously mine data from everything, but these are examples of overtly creating a tool/game to collect or improve a specific type of data.