Google Image Labeler - real Game or a Game to collect metadata for their images?

I went to Google Image Labeler through Matt Cutt’s Article. This is something similar to that of Flickr’s Tag Game - Fastr.

You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a 90-second period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn some points and move on to the next image until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.

Well, the game is cool and I love ‘em. Google says that it allows you to label random images to help improve the quality of Google’s image search results.

Not to be so hibadi gibadi about this, but it also looks like a a free BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) job being done through the medium of an addictive free game. A search result provider like Google will need metadatas for their huge volume of Images, Media. What more better way than ask to people to tag, label them for free in form of a game! So, when Google has the metadatas with labels, tags for their untagged, undetermined, unlabeled images, they will fairly have a huge databases of image with proper tags, labels. I hope that they do not have anything fishy in their strategy but is just a game!

I am not sure and have not seen but have heard that Amazon has such a service or a quasi-service where anyone can tag/label images appropriately and get paid for the number of images tagged. Though, here they select kinda multiple choices. I was consulted/discussed by coupla friends who were offering me this idea of getting this service to India’s BPO services and the calculated earning for the people working there was descent for Indian standard. I’ve never been interested in anything that is mundane and perennially manual labor, thus my interest in it was miniscule. But, this new Google’s Game caught my attention and got me thinking.