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Google Outlines the Role of Its Human Evaluators

Posted by timothy on from the humans-are-dead-they're-probably-dead dept.

An anonymous reader writes "For many years, Google, on its Explanation of Our Search Results page, claimed that 'a site's ranking in Google's search results is automatically determined by computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query.' Then in May of 2007, that statement changed: 'A site's ranking in Google's search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page's relevance to a given query.' What happened? Google's core search team explain."

4 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. But for how long? by wdsci · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This reminds me of a comment from a friend of mine who works at Google - he says that he's gotten the sense of a company philosophy (unofficial of course) that advocates doing things automatically, without human intervention as much as possible. Basically, they work as though there's an algorithm for everything and it's just a matter of how long it takes us (well, how long it takes them) to produce it and properly refine it. So I wouldn't be surprised if the reliance on human evaluators decreases over time. I bet Google would really like for the original language of their search result explanation to be true, but they've had to make concessions to reality...

  2. Re:Google is PEOPLE by _Sprocket_ · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Soylent Green doesn't get a shot at the people until later.

  3. Fuzzy logic is killing Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Slightly off-topic: Am I the only one who finds Google web search less and less useful? There's no way to really force literal search anymore. Everything I enter gets auto-"corrected". Plus signs, quotation marks or that misleading field "this exact wording or phrase" in Advanced Search used to help, but that stopped working a while ago. Everything is fuzzified now. Is there an alternative or some trick I haven't heard of?

    1. Re:Fuzzy logic is killing Google by caffeinemessiah · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Everything is fuzzified now

      First off, I don't think fuzzy logic has anything to do with Google's innards. What you're referring to is more generally called word sense disambiguation, and as far as I know, you can force a literal search by putting it in quotes. You'll also get "fuzzy" results, but if you don't see your literal at the top of the results, it probably doesn't exist and I'm guessing the Goog is trying to be helpful by breaking up the terms. Of course, you could Bing it to verify... :)

      --
      An old-timer with old-timey ideas.