The other side of mechanical turk
There was a story going around a little while ago about how Belkin paid people via Amazon Mechanical Turk to give them good reviews.
The idea of mechanical turk is that you can programatically access human intelligence through an API.
The thing is though, normal APIs don’t tell everyone what kind of problems they are working on.
This is something that worries us a bit about working with Mechanical Turk, which we want to use with Adylitica to help do ad optimization work. The thing is though, keywords can be a private advantage, and there’s a cottage industry around finding out what your competitors keywords are.
Personally I think that Google would be smart just to let everyone see everyone else’s keywords, but right now you have a big advantage if you find golden keywords no one else knows about.
So when you develop for Mechanical Turk, keep in mind that it’s a potential security leak.
