Google Uses Humans to Help Searches

Google isn’t all computers and algorithms — living, breathing human beings help the search engine run smoothly.

“Google does in fact have a global army of people called quality raters who work part-time in their own homes,” New York Times reporter Saul Hansell wrote in a blog.

What these people do, Google engineer Matt Cutts told Hansell, is help test proposed changes to Google’s formulas.

“They tell us whether search results are better or not,” Cutts said.

“Here are search results on the left, here is a set on the right. Do the taste test. You tell us which set of search results you prefer.”

Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research, said in a recent interview that the people Google uses are “contractors that we hire to give their judgment. We train them on how to identify spam and other bad sites, and then we record their judgments.”

Google’s job site “lists a bunch of part-time positions for ‘quality raters’ in various languages,” Hansell notes.

Cutts confirmed: “There is a role for humans in Google search.”