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by stevesearer 4425 days ago
It is a good idea and Google uses games and tools to gather data on a fairly regular basis. Some examples:

-GOOG-411 (voice recognition)

-Ingress (location data)

-Google Image Labeler (image identification)

-Recaptcha (book / streetview ocr)

I'm sure there's more, but those are the ones off the top of my head.

EDIT: They obviously mine data from everything, but these are examples of overtly creating a tool/game to collect or improve a specific type of data.