Worth noting that one of the most high profile uses of Mechanical Turk was in September 2007 to review satellite imagery in a massive crowdsourced effort to find missing record-setting aviator Steve Fossett.
The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.
> Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success. Major Cynthia Ryan later said it had been more of a hindrance than a help. She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward. Many of the ostensible sightings proved to be images of CAP aircraft flying search grids, or simply mistaken artifacts of old images. Psychics flooded the search base in Minden with predictions of where the aviator could be found. One man from Canada was particularly persistent with daily calls to Ryan. Ryan noted that every message, letter, or phone call was taken seriously, which swamped the USAF specialists assigned the task of reviewing every one of them without regard to apparent plausibility. In retrospect, the crowdsource effort was "not ready for prime time", according to Ryan
freely available satellite/aerial images in 2007 were in no way high resolution enough to identify such a tiny airplane, and in many places, they still aren't.
The effort failed to find any areas of interest and the missing aviator was found the following year by a hiker. I wonder if there was any analysis after the fact to understand if the imagery actually provided any hints regarding the eventual crash site.