Ask HN: Is Mechanical Turk good for getting recommendations?

4 points by saracen75 16 years ago | 4 comments

I am building up a database of recommendations for interesting and off the beaten path activities people can do in various cities around the world...Europe, US, Asia, etc.

To speed up the process, as well as get content from places I have no friends in, I am thinking of posting a job on Amazon Mechanical Turk but I don't know about the quality I will get.

Do you guys think it will work? Or maybe there are some other better alternatives?

byoung2 16 years ago |

It depends...

If you are just looking for top 10 lists, it should be fine. If you want detailed reports like WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page), you'll have a harder time finding people who can write well for a low price.

Mechanical Turk is like any other system of inputs and outputs: what you get out of it depends on what you put in. From my experience, if you give very detailed instructions and examples of what you want, and you pay a decent reward, you'll get good results. If you want people to write 500 word articles for $0.05, you'll get crap.

saracen75 16 years ago | |

Thanks byoung.

I am prepared to pay well for really interesting and refreshingly novel activity alternatives. I know that it will be hard to find good writers from MT, but I what I really want is just basic information like what, where, when, how much, and the website link or contact if available.

What I am not sure about is whether giving detailed description and parameters for the job, together with a reasonably good reward, will be likely to produce reasonably good results...

What about any alternatives to MT that you know of?

byoung2 16 years ago | | |

Here's one technique I've had success with on MTurk. I needed 500 descriptions written (250-350 words each) so I created a test hit with just 25 assignments. The reward was $2 with a $1 bonus for excellent work. I got about 10 really good results, the rest were average to terrible. I feel bad about not paying people unless they just didn't follow the instructions or they plagiarized, so I ended up paying everyone. For the 10 excellent results, I paid them the $1 bonus, and in the bonus message, I told them to contact me for more assignments. For the 3 that contacted me, I worked out a flat rate to write 50 at a time.

You can also use Elance to find writers, but these tend to be more expensive.

samratjp 16 years ago |

You could start off with some automation i.e. make a crawler. Start with seeds from top rated places from Yelp, Gowalla, etc. Then, blast your queries across some travel site APIs and freebase.com to see what kinds of interesting places you get. Then, you can perhaps do model based collaborative filtering and do the recommendations automatically.

Or for inspiration... http://www.tripbase.com