You Know It When You See It

摘要

Lukas biewald was a software developer at search upstart Powerset when he saw an opportunity. Powerset needed feedback on its search results. But it couldn't afford to hire thousands of temporary workers to do the job. Biewald started using Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace of 200,000 moonlighters run by Amazon.rnIt was just what Powerset needed: 100 people rating results for two hours, at bargain prices. The labor costs an average of $2 an hour. The hitch was that Biewald didn't know if the results were any good. Amazon tells customers they can choose not to pay "turkers" (as the workers are often called) if the work is poorly done. "But it would take us too long to figure that out," says Biewald. In December 2007 Biewald, now 27, left Powerset to bring accountability to this unwieldy market. Dolores Labs, which he co-founded with former Powerset colleague Christopher Van Pelt, makes it easy for companies to tap thousands of workers for short stretches-and get good quality work. The San Francisco company has a dozen algorithms that assess the accuracy and speed of Amazon's turkers. It acts as a middleman between companies with grunt work to be done and workers roaming Mechanical Turk for jobs. It spells out the pay and job specifications on the Turk Web site.