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Ask HN: How does Amazon make use of Mechanical Turk?
I dont understand the value Amazon gets from using the Mechanical Turk. Can someone here explain?
- rgovind 12y agoI don't know about Amazon, but I do know some people who use it to get mundane but necessary tasks done. For example, if you have a forum and you want to seed with questions...you can use mechanical turk to get people that. Also, for a semantic search engine I was working on, we needed to add categories for various articles. We used Mechanical Turk for this.
- miguelrochefort 12y agoTell me more about that semantic search engine.
- rgovind 12y agoProblem: How do you identify what the keywords in a search term mean. A word like Shingles can mean shingles roof, or shingles disease or shingles concept in search engine. For this, you first start with a known set of documents (known means their type, whether business, science, sports, etc is known), and index them. For each word/phrase, you compute the proability that it belongs to a certain category. For example, when you see Shingles, you say 50% is disease, 40% is roofs and 10% is code. Depending on your understanding of the user, you will most probably present health related results at the top of SERP. Btw, its not my idea...I was just an employee!
- shogun21 12y agoAmazon gets a small cut from every batch of HITs. Requesters pay for a bunch of small tasks for the workers to complete (which typically earns them a couple cents each), and Amazon takes a small piece of that.
- spilk 12y agoI'm pretty sure they use it for the "search by picture" function in their mobile apps. Not sure if they directly use it for anything else.