Ask HN: How do/could you use Mechanical Turk

3 points·spdustin··7 comments

I've seen a lot of "instant" services that appear to have a group of workers behind the scene, and they appear to be a sort of "siloed" Mechanical Turk.

So what DO you use Mechanical Turk for? Or what could you use it to accomplish in a cost effective way?

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We are making software for heavy equipment brokers to manage their inventory and deals. A lot of times these guys have incomplete information for their contacts and so have a backend service that can take partially filled in customer data and complete the missing fields. The contacts in this industry are not on LinkedIn or other social media typically so services like FullContact's API aren't very useful thus the need for human powered research.

That's a great example. How is the cost structured for something like that?

Between 0.01 and 0.05 for item

I used it to transcribe two years worth of handwritten journals I kept from 2012-2014. Got it done for less than 4c per page, including annotating pages that had a doodle, noting the date of a given piece of writing, etc.

I'm using it to basically data-mine myself.

We use the Amazon MTurk for a bunch of things: Categorize websites (ecommerce yes or not, blog, etc.); extract contact information from websites; extract attributes from product titles, etc.

It is important to provide clear instructions to the Turk.

Academics use it for surveys quite a bit.

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