Ask HN: Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA?

10 pointsby tow21vor 16 Jahren8 comments

I've got a bunch of tasks that I think would be ideal for mechanical-turk-ing. (lots of data-cleanup drudgery - manually reconciling different spellings/capitalizations/abbreviations/etc of entity names)

But, I'm UK based, and Mechanical Turk is US only. What do non-US people use for farming out this sort of job?

6 comments

taylesvor 16 Jahren

The apparently soon to be released Gridworks project from Freebase (http://blog.freebase.com/2010/03/26/preview-freebase-gridwor...) looks like it could go a long way to help with data cleansing, especially with grouping and batch editing similar mis-spellings and such.

iamelgringovor 16 Jahren

I had a project where I had to verify several thousand addresses that I had scraped. I ended up outsourcing it to eLance. I found a company in India via eLance that had 25 people in front of computers with an internet connection, and they chewed away at the list. It took them a month or two but they verified 6200 addresses by hand for me for $700.

jongosvor 16 Jahren

Crowd Flower

streetyvor 16 Jahren

That's a nice find. Looks like the concept is similar to cloudkick but for human workers.

They also list their "worker channels" should you want to go straight to the source.

iamelgringovor 16 Jahren

Link: http://crowdflower.com/

vide0starvor 16 Jahren

Interns!

PG-13vor 16 Jahren

Mechanical Turk is pretty crappy, so I don't think you're really missing out.

zen53vor 16 Jahren

Try SmartSheet - Based on Mechanical Turk.