Asking Questions to Real People… And Getting Real Answers!
Attending Affiliate Summit last month I got to hear Jeff Barr speak about Amazon’s newest web service technologies. One that was particularly interesting was the Mechanical Turk web service. Mechanical Turk is “artificial artificial intelligence”… It allows users to complete simple tasks that people do better than computers. For example, identifying objects in pictures, translating text, or even answering simple questions.
A recent post to the AWS Blog tells about a new web site that offers the service of asking questions.
Have you ever needed to get an answer to a question in a hurry, perhaps something that you can’t find in your favorite search engine? If so, you may want to tap into the internet-scale Mechanical Turk workforce using the new question asking system at Ask For Cents.
The premise is you pay people pennies, nickels or dimes to answer any questions you have. The issue is the quality of the answers you get back. Currently, the site is in Alpha testing and submitting questions is free… So try it out.
I had talked to Jeff Barr briefly at the Affiliate Summit about a similiar idea and he mentioned he thought someone was working on it. I assume he meant this. So I tested it out from a shopping perspective. I asked three questions, each receiving two answers from the site. The results were very quick (within 5-10 minutes). The first two questions were pricing based questions and the third question was more of a research question.
Question #1 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 06:59:01 +0200
Which online web site has the Kenneth Cole KC3500 Wrist Watch for the cheapest price?
Answer 1 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 07:03:01 +0200
Ashford.com Link
Answer 2 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 07:03:21 +0200
amazon has 2 sellersWorldofWatches
Diamond.com
both are 131.00
Critique
These answers are both good, but could be better. The real answer is Ashford.com, which was Answer #1. But they also have a coupon right now for 20% off or a different coupon for 10% off and free shipping.
Question #2 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:19:05 +0200
What web site has the lowest price on the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card for a notebook computer? Is there any coupon or rebate for it?
Answer 1 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:22:15 +0200
SuperWarehouse.com Link
$30 rebate
Answer 2 received Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:29:04 +0200
http://www.directron.com/audigy2zsnb.htmlDirectron has it for $85.99 with a $30 mail in rebate. The rebate form
is at the bottom of the site listed above
Critique
Good answers, but again not the best. This was actually a deal posted on xpBargains.com from Radioshack for $90 - $40 rebate is $50 shipped. The Directron is cheaper, but before shipping costs.
Question #3 sent Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:42:55 +0200
Where can I buy a remote shutter for panansonic lumix fz30?
Answer 1 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:45:18 +0200
PartStore.com Link
Answer 2 recieved Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:48:59 +0200
Try here:
Bhphotovideo.com Link
Critique
Both answers were incorrect! Didn’t match what the question was. I took the question from a Yahoo! Answers post which was currently waiting for answers. The research question yieled the worst results… fitting it was the most complex question.
My initial thoughts for using mechanical turk was finding some way to integrate it into shopping or shopping comparison sites. Maybe let users ask questions and rather than waiting for a shopping community to respond, receive answers quickly.
Or how about from a mobile device? Asking a product question while in the store and receiving an answer back in 5 minutes… Hmm. Contact me with business proposals 
Technorati Tags: mechanical turk, amazon, web services, social shopping, answers
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All of Amazon’s new next-gen features are generally very poorly implemented at the moment. The wikis, discussion boards, and and especially the tagging system make very little sense the way they’re set up. There’s a million comments/ratings on some popular items that come in multiple formats. There’s no way I can leave or find a comment on a particular format/version, say unabridged audio book for example, but that’s not really important when I can quickly see that xArmorForAmyx has tagged the book with some meaningless tag to remind herself (for all I know) to maybe buy it when she learns to read. Apparently you can have personal tags that everyone sees rather than having a distinction between those and actual useful social tagging. They should just set up building blocks and release more extensive APIs and people will develop great stuff on their own sites FOR them which would assuredly bring in more traffic right now then they get for implementing new half-assed features that only existing active users are going to be exposed to. A little more Google, a little less Microsoft. Know what I mean?
Anyhow, I don’t see much promise in this service or related services just now. Perhaps if they let people define the categories in which they were an expert (which could be revoked with too many poorly rated answers) and then routed the questions specifically to those people it might help but only with a really huge active userbase. These days the hardest part about getting decent answers is wading through all the crap (search engines are just filled with commercial links and “clever” squatters trying to lure you in) and finding the forums where the pros (and prosumers) go to talk shop. Once you’ve found such a place, there may be more than a 5-10 minute wait but overall you’re likely to get a lot of quality answers/opinions on products/whatever from many people that are experts in the subject and you only have to spend a few minutes a day or so checking in, reading your thread, and possibly replying. So the key here I believe is finding top quality community forums, indexing them, and going from there. The only problem you might run into there is the forum may not care for the influx of retarded questions.
I still wish there was an index of quality non-commercial review sites for products but structured blogging/microformats and aggregation should hopefully help that if it catches on more. I even have my reservations about that though. I thought of creating scripts to strip out commercial and fraudulent links from google when searching for product reviews using anti-spam measures like regex-filters, bayesian filtering, and possibly even community powered fingerprinting but then I realized, honestly, for most items there’d be no links left.
Ultimately the question remains, will we actually *improve* the way individuals can use the ‘net in a more efficient/effective manner before we destroy it? Ha.
More thoughts to come on my blog if I ever have time to finish the design for it (kind of hypocritical for a “content > function > form” guy like me I know).
Ja
It does indeed seem like Amazon is experimenting quite a bit lately. I do not believe, however, they should be faulted. With Wiki’s, tags, mechanical turk, etc, it appears Amazon is innovating and gauging acceptance.
Edit: “Should NOT be faulted”