A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems.  The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those barriers.<p>Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I&#x27;m sure certain ones would make good research problems.  It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.