[citation needed] In 2006, Ahn stated that the game could "effectively label all Google indexed images in two months".

In the earliest months, through about November 2006, players could see each other's guesses during play by mousing over the image.

When "congenita abuse" started (see below) the player could see if their partner was using those terms, while the game was underway.

During the first few months of 2007, regular players grew to recognize a group of images that signified a "robot" partner, always with the same labels in the same order.

This made it much easier to see the exact value of specific versus general labeling.

Note that players from around the world were allowed to play, and both American and British English would be encountered (for example, soccer vs. football).

Terms with low specificity like "trees" or "man" earned only 50 points.

There was no screening for correctness, so if both players typed "Jupiter" for an image of Saturn, they would presumably both get 140 points.

Labels that had been agreed on by previous users would show on an "off limits" list and could not be used in that round.

This would explain the rather frequent circumstance when it seemed a partner could not think of words like "car," "bird," or "girl."

One speculation is that this was simply an error, while another is that it was a test to see how quickly people would pass when their descriptions did not match.

Google was betting on users' competitiveness to rack up high scores to swell the number of images ranked.

The game was not designed simply for fun; it was also a way for Google to ensure that its keywords were matched to correct images.

[7] It appeared that Google was getting spammed with words from the following list: abrasives, accretion, bequeathing, carcinoma, congenita, diphosphonate, entrepreneurialism, forbearance, and googley.

[8] Users were not awarded for labeling images by any means other than points but they may learn new English language words slowly.