Ask HN: Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA?

10 points·tow21··8 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?

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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.

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.

Crowd Flower

Link: http://crowdflower.com/

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.

Interns!

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

Try SmartSheet - Based on Mechanical Turk.

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