Secret Google Evaluation Lab
Although it’s been speculated that Google is manually spot checking some of its rankings, this is the first time we’ve seen any evidence. (via Slashdot)
Since Henk van Ess’s site is being Slashdotted - I’m putting up a mirror of the flash movie from Google’s Secret Evaluation Lab. I hope this isn’t a hoax.
But if it is true, Google’s evaluation lab may be signaling a move towards TrustRank - with the evaluation lab responsible for picking out the seed sites and testing rankings.
I’ve noticed that Google has been hiring “Quality Raters” and “Quality Evaluators” recently.
In particular, applicants will be asked to draw on experience living, studying, and keeping in touch with a country’s (web) culture and language.
Most likely these people will be rating the quality of AdSense and AdWords ads, but the listings do sound like Google is looking for some focus groups. Obviously, this is just speculation.
Michael Nguyen | Search Engine Optimization | Comments (4)
June 2nd, 2005 at 5:04 am
Google’s Human Touch - Rater Hub - The Secret Google Lab?
I am sure many of you already heard the buzz about this “Secret Google Lab” rumor. Let me give you the timeline of events, that I know of, on how it broke the news. On September 19th, 2004 a WebmasterWorld…
June 6th, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Random low waged evaluators would probably not be the people they would want to use to designate the seed sites for an algorithm such as TrustRank.
IMHO tose people would more likely be used to flag sites for formal review, or help train the search relevancy algorithms.
June 7th, 2005 at 6:00 am
I agree Aaron, that was my first conclusion upon reading Henk’s article - and he made it sound like these evaluators were more important than they really are.
After a couple more articles came out, it became fairly obvious. These evaluators are responsible for generating feedback regarding relevancy of the search algorithms - nothing more.
March 25th, 2006 at 12:59 am
Look at this url, was between my referers: https://www.google.com/evaluation/search/rating/task-edit?task=xxxxxxxx