Google Image Labeler: Google licenses ESP Game from Luis von Ahn

Search engine giant Google has launched a new fun game named Google Image Labeler and it is based on the work of Luis von Ahn and his ESP Game.

The game is designed to let web users have some fun time interacting with random users on the web and help them improve upon their image searching capabilities.

Google Image Labeler gets two people together and shows them an image. The two people unknown to each other are told to add labels to the image being shown to them.

If both the users are able to match a single label to the shown image, they are sent forward to the next image.

This is similar to tagging feature used by most image gallery websites out there including Yahoo! Flickr. Google is expected to use these labels to improve image searching on their search engine.