Meta Turk
March 11, 2012 8:31 PM   Subscribe

How can I best design a Mechanical Turk question to get the best results within my budget?

Here's the criteria I have for the question:

I want mailing addresses, for companies or agencies or non-profits, that are either national or international and sell or give away a tangible product (the US does not have to be the nation, but I think I need to confine myself to companies that sell products in English speaking countries). If the company sells something you can't put in a box (even a really big one) I am not interested.

That's all I want. Name, Street, Postal Code, Country and a citation of where the address was acquired for verification (does not have to be a URL).

Which template would be the best for this? How much time should I set? What kind of results should I expect? How much should I pay? I need 500 addresses (minimum) that aren't duplicates. How do I avoid duplicates? (I don't need 50 people sending me the address to Applebee's.)

I would prefer the marketing address, but will take the main corporate address failing this.

I am not married to Mechanical Turk, but my budget is $500 for this whole project and half that will need to be spent elsewhere.
posted by cjorgensen to Computers & Internet (1 answer total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
You could split this up into to two tasks getting addresses and error checking.

The first task would be to get addresses - aim for 1k and offer .10 to .25 per address - .25 will get your addresses very quickly.

I think you can do an iframe to input into a google spreadsheet form, and then have each person check the spreadsheet for the company they are about to put in.

So we have:

Find an address for any company with x,y,z criteria.
check if on list already
if not on list, fill the details into this box.

And as I think about it, error checking should be easy since everything will be in spreadsheet form already - just sort by name, then address fields (zip, city)

Remember, you don't have to aim for the whole bag all at once, do a couple trial runs - 10 or 15 address, offer .10 and they'll get done and then iterate from there. Shouldn't be too much trouble to come up with.

Good Luck!
posted by Brent Parker at 12:26 AM on March 12, 2012


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