Ask HN: Does anyone have experience with Mechanical Turk for business?
I am thinking about using it, or a service like it where I can hire simple manpower very cheaply, for various SEO needs (like submission to directories). Has anyone here ever used it for business before? What were your experiences?
2 comments
I used it for a project for a client. If you want directory submission (and mass directory submission isn't really that helpful), there are plenty of people who will do that as a service for you, and their average quality will be better than the Turkers.
In general, quality is about what you would expect from someone with 2 cents on the line. You pretty much have to write your own logic to pit Turkers against each other for every unit of finished output, or some of the abysmal ones will escape into whatever the project you're doing. (My client just filed 10 bugs against my data set caused by a) turning the floor for data quality down in options and then noticing b) "amusing" Turker understandings of the instructions.)
That said, a few hundred bucks saved me a week of work (and by implication, saved my client several thousand dollars) of having me have to hand-classify a few thousand datums. For their specific need, Turker accuracy was good enough.
In general, quality is about what you would expect from someone with 2 cents on the line. You pretty much have to write your own logic to pit Turkers against each other for every unit of finished output, or some of the abysmal ones will escape into whatever the project you're doing. (My client just filed 10 bugs against my data set caused by a) turning the floor for data quality down in options and then noticing b) "amusing" Turker understandings of the instructions.)
That said, a few hundred bucks saved me a week of work (and by implication, saved my client several thousand dollars) of having me have to hand-classify a few thousand datums. For their specific need, Turker accuracy was good enough.
Thank you for your excellent advice - I'll be sure to be very clear in instructions.
hey KLbarry -- i'm a PM on mechanical turk. Did you end up trying the service? you can ping me at natala @ amazon dot com if you have questions.