Who do you think turns all those words into an easy click?
Behind the seemingly magical offerings of the Internet are thousands of human beings madly inputting data around the clock. These jobs are creating opportunities for some of the world's poorest. The work ranges from the slightly creative, such as crafting sentences for ads to snag search traffic, to the rote--typing in descriptions of hamburgers for online menus.
These digital bricklayers are in a sense building the new information pyramid. In Madras, India, "editors" making a fifth of U.S. pay work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to digitize archived American newspapers from the 1700s to the 1980s. In Boston, NY, Ann Arbor, MI and Palo Alto, CA, Google Books workers manually turn each and every page of millions of library books so they can be scanned and made available to any visitor to the Google Web site.
Take ProQuest Historical Newspapers archive. Subscribers can type in an author name, headline, or any keyword and across any original image of any article from any historical issue of nine major U.S. newspapers. The process starts at the company's headquarters in Ann Arbor, MI, where an operator scans reams of microfilm through a machine that creates a digital copy of each issue. That copy is sent overseas electronically to the shop floor at Ninestars Information Technology Ltd., a digital conversion company in Madras.
There, workers digitally cut up and sort the images into individual articles. Then they tag the headline, first paragraph, caption, and author byline and run a program to convert each into text. The rest of the article remains an image file. After quality assurance, it's ready to be added to the online archive for Web surfers to explore. That process is repeated by Ninestar's 850 employees, 24 hours a day, over three shifts.
Source: BusinessWeek, May 22, 2006