There are rarely email addresses on a particular article, it's usually a matter of tracking down the author and finding his/her email address.

We ended up getting addresses for about half of the article authors.

You might find this service I built useful: It queries the Bing API for different combos of the name/domain ([email protected], [email protected], etc) and returns their counts, and then deeplinks into a Google verbatim search of that email address.

http://emailguesser.com

Source is on Github: https://github.com/yahelc/emailguesser.com

That is sick! Oh...that feels like it definitely belongs in this hack. Great stuff.

So the the Mturk worker would check the article for the email, if it's listed great, if not they might Google it?

Exactly. Full instructions for the worker are available here: http://screencast.com/t/HBl34oh58p

dude.... screw that KickStarter thing ;-) Build this as a business! I've literally been trying to solve this problem for a month. Freelancer.com sucks and you can't buy cheap targeted email lists. You saved me a huge headache. Thanks!

And all for $0.03

Does that make anyone else feel a bit ick at mTurk?

For this particular example I don't understand it.

But I look through reddit's "What is this thing?" subreddits to try to find what the thing is. I do that to improve my skills with search engines. (Really, try it sometime. A blurry photograph of a rusty lump of metal, with no context other than "I found this in a field" makes you think hard how to find things).

3 cents is no where near enough to make me want to do this more, or to persuade me that I'm not wasting time online, but it goes in the free money jar.

I guess there's a risk that offering money puts off more people than it attracts - more people will do something for free than if you offer a tiny payment.

Agreed. Surely the ~350 email addresses (although stated about 1/2 were valid) were worth much more than $10. In my opinion, it's unethical.

Comments welcome here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6483636