

Ask HN: How does Amazon make use of Mechanical Turk? - rememberlenny

I dont understand the value Amazon gets from using the Mechanical Turk. Can someone here explain?
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rgovind
I don't know about Amazon, but I do know some people who use it to get mundane
but necessary tasks done. For example, if you have a forum and you want to
seed with questions...you can use mechanical turk to get people that.

Also, for a semantic search engine I was working on, we needed to add
categories for various articles. We used Mechanical Turk for this.

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miguelrochefort
Tell me more about that semantic search engine.

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rgovind
Problem: How do you identify what the keywords in a search term mean. A word
like Shingles can mean shingles roof, or shingles disease or shingles concept
in search engine. For this, you first start with a known set of documents
(known means their type, whether business, science, sports, etc is known), and
index them. For each word/phrase, you compute the proability that it belongs
to a certain category. For example, when you see Shingles, you say 50% is
disease, 40% is roofs and 10% is code. Depending on your understanding of the
user, you will most probably present health related results at the top of
SERP.

Btw, its not my idea...I was just an employee!

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shogun21
Amazon gets a small cut from every batch of HITs. Requesters pay for a bunch
of small tasks for the workers to complete (which typically earns them a
couple cents each), and Amazon takes a small piece of that.

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spilk
I'm pretty sure they use it for the "search by picture" function in their
mobile apps. Not sure if they directly use it for anything else.

