Google’s 2017 Quality Raters

Who would have thought that Google would actually use real humans to improve search results!? Google is using a new way to better identify content that is potentially offensive or upsetting to searchers. The goal of this is to allow for only factual, accurate & trustworthy information to show up first in search results & they’ll be using humans to achieve it!

In fact, we can think of them as an army. Over 10,000 contractors worldwide will be used to evaluate search results. These raters will be given actual searches to conduct, then they will rate the pages that appear in the top results as to how good they really appear to users.

These army of raters won’t have the power to alter Google’s results directly. A rater marking a particular result as poorer quality than the others will not all the sudden take a plunge in rankings. However, in time, there may be impact on low-quality pages that are identified by these raters as well as ones that aren’t reviewed directly.

So how do they do it? How do these quality raters spot offensive pages? They’re given a set of guidelines that are over 200 pages long……. Instructing them on how to properly asses the website’s quality.

What generally makes a website offensive or upsetting?

• Content that’s hateful or promotes violence against specific groups of individuals
• Content with offensive terminology
• Graphic violence
• Harmful activities

So far, nothing immediate will happen to your site if it contains any of the offensive language, but it will allow Google to better figure out how to automatically identify upsetting or offensive data in general. Making for a more harmonious internet! If you are indeed looking for factual information on specific topics that could be deemed as offensive, whether you’re researching it for a class or for your own general knowledge, you will be able to find better & more accurate information than before.

In a world that is all over the board when it comes to what’s potentially upsetting or offensive, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of feedback comes of it. I wouldn’t want to have this job! How about you? As SEO’s who deal with reputable businesses, we’re most anxious to see sites & information that are unhelpful go to the wayside (ahem… your competitors). Though this isn’t an example of an unhelpful website, it is an example of how search can be improved when it comes accurate information –

We Google’d ‘Who invented homework’ and got this –

But when we went to Bing… they claim Roberto Nevilis isn’t actually real!

Makes you wonder right!?

Do you think Google can do a better job with search results? Let us know on Twitter!