Ask HN: Mechanical Turk - equivalent outside USA?

[tow21]

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?

[tayles]

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.

[iamelgringo]

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.

[jongos]

Crowd Flower

[streety]

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.

[iamelgringo]

Link: http://crowdflower.com/

[vide0star]

Interns!

[PG-13]

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

[zen53]

Try SmartSheet - Based on Mechanical Turk.