Are you a Google gopher?

Google has just taken on legions of new workers. None are being paid - and you might be one of them.
Since workplace computers were hooked up to the internet, office workers have found more ways of wasting time at work, with e-mailed jokes or videos of apparently-amusing accidents.

For all the elaborate projects that computers are working on, there are still some things these machines are very poor at. One of these is seeing. A computer will recognise that something is an image, but will have no idea what it is an image of. So a project to, say, label all the images on the web will need to get humans to pitch in and help.
But who is going to sit around saying what they see for hours at a time? Enter Dr von Ahn, with a new game.
"Rather than paying people to label images for me, I get them to want to label images for free"

This is the game you might have been playing online: paired up with a stranger, both of you are shown the same image, and both come up with a label for that image that the other will have thought of. Once you get a match, you move on, building up points.

It's important to understand how compulsive this simple activity can be: it is a race, and it is rewarding when you find a partner on the same wavelength. And if a partner fails to label quickly enough, there is the frustration of lost points - even though the rewarding of said points is wholly arbitrary and worthless.

Dr von Ahn has created a suite of image-labelling games, and noticed many players putting in more than hours each week. For the public good, he decided to cut players off after 10 hours of continuous play if they had connected from a university computer.

BBC: