Amazon continues to be at the forefront of new technology. A new way to do both research and get money is now “on-demand” with Amazon’s crowdsourcing technology, “Mechanical Turk.” Don’t know what that is? The term comes from the 18th century, when a chess playing “robot” toured Europe to defeat almost every opponent it faced. It was soon revealed, however, that there was a person inside making all of the moves. This is why the Turk became a representative for Amazon, showing there is only so much computers can do, and with this, Mechanical Turk was invented in 2005. It was initially created for in-house research to clean up and organize its products on its web pages. Although it is still in beta, it has been public since then, and that is where HITs come in. They are Human Intelligence Tasks, surveys and product reviews that computers are currently unable to do, but humans are perfect for. These HITs include tasks from any business, not just Amazon, and it is estimated that there are 500,000 users in over 100 countries, with HITs available for payment for as little as 1 cent.
Students and researchers can also take advantage of this technology by posting a survey or questionnaire and easily getting human feedback from a huge pool of participants. This is a better alternative to traditional research methods because of the convenience, low cost and huge pool of responders. Researchers also don’t have to worry about validity problems that happen with in-person surveys and focus groups, like a lack of sampling pool and interviewer bias. Business can also use Mechanical Turk to their advantage for easy and comprehensive market research on products.
Mechanical Turk is currently still in beta because Amazon plans to “continue adding features,” although the service is still fully functional. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next, but at least we already know there are humans, not robots giving the answers with this “Turk.”