<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Google uses a team of people to judge the quality and relevancy of webpages that appear in its search engine, it has been revealed.\r\n\r\nAn article published today by The Register details a 160-page manual, produced by Google, which explains to 'raters' how they should judge an individual website based on its relevance, level of spam and quality.\r\n\r\nGoogle would like you to believe that its search results and the hierarchy of those results is dictated almost entirely by super complex computer algorithms. While that may be true, it's also not the first time it's been proven that the search giant uses humans to manually sift through some of its search results.\r\n\r\nThe Register has also revealed that these raters, who are hired through contractors such as Leapforce and Lionbridge, work from home to check the webpages.\r\n\r\nOn the topic of relevance, Google's manual advises the raters to give websites one of the following grades, based on their own opinion; &amp;quot;Vital&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Useful&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Relevant&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Slightly Relevant&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Off-topic or Useless&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Unratable&amp;quot;. A spam rating, meanwhile, can consist of either \u201CNot Spam\u201D, \u201CMaybe Spam\u201D, \u201CSpam\u201D, \u201CPorn\u201D or \u201CMalicious\u201D.\r\n\r\nBy its very nature, asking home workers to rate websites based on the search terms used by a Googler is a subjective method. For example, at one point the manual tells the raters to consider the user\u2019s intent behind an individual search query. It reads: \u201CWhat was the user trying to accomplish when he typed this query?\u201D\r\n\r\nGoogle categorises search queries in three distinct ways: an \u201Caction intent\u201D means that a user wants to accomplish a specific goal, while \u201Cdo queries\u201D and \u201Cgo queries\u201D are presumably more question or advice orientated.\r\n\r\nOver the years, websites have tried to trick Google\u2019s algorithms into placing them higher in its search results. It\u2019s basically why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) still exists and continues to be taught to this day. However, it\u2019s encouraging to know that Google is trying to combat this by hiring real people, who are far less easily fooled, to find and remove some of the worst suspects.\r\n\r\nHow many of these raters are working at any one time is unclear. It\u2019s also hard to know exactly how many websites they are able to check, rate and approve in any given day, month or year. With the number of websites constantly growing, it\u2019s unlikely that this approach will ever be used to check the majority of Google\u2019s search results - although anything is better than nothing, right?\r\n\r\nOf course, on the other side of the fence it\u2019s important for Google to be checking the raters too. If someone knows very little about a specific topic, say cross stitch sewing for argument\u2019s sake, they might not realise from the information alone whether a webpage is entirely relevant.\r\n\r\nFrom the outside, this whole initiative looks to be part of a much broader quality assurance strategy that is being implemented by Google. By checking even a handful of search queries with real employees, the results and data that it gets back will give them a much better idea of how their automated algorithm is coping on a daily basis.\r\n\r\nImage Credit: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/11/27/a-google-manual-reveals-a-team-of-contracted-home-workers-who-help-make-its-search-engine-more-relevant/>