On Sep 14, 12:38 am, Dan G wrote:

At the risk of repeating myself, please don't try to use Google Earth
to search. Only use Mechanical Turk. The reason is simple - the area
to be searched is huge, and MTurk makes sure that each area gets
looked at, but only the appropriate number of times. If you use Google
Earth, you could well be looking at areas that have been searched
already by MTurk, wasting your time, while unsearched areas go
ignored, hindering the search.

I disagree. I think that people not searching in the officially
prescribed methodology do not hinder the search, except for in the
very minor way of consuming Google Earth bandwidth. They might not be
helping as much as they could be, but they certainly
_are_contributing, and are not hindering the search in any measurable
way.

Some people have, and know that they have, above average capacity for
pattern recognition under certain circumstances of target and
background, signal and noise. It makes sense for them to take
advantage of their strengths in whatever way they see fit.

The thing that will hinder the search most of all is lack of people to
search. I think that it is important to keep people engaged by letting
them work to their individual strengths.

Bob K.