Google employs 10,000 human raters

The NY Times explains:

Most people have little understanding of how Google’s search engine ranks different sites, what it chooses to include or exclude, and how it picks the top results among hundreds of billions of pages. And Google tightly guards the mathematical equations behind it all — the rest of the world has to take their word that it is done in an unbiased manner.

“The complexity of ranking and rating is always going to lead to some lack of understanding for people outside of the company,” said Frank Pasquale, an information law professor at the University of Maryland. “The problem is that a lot of people aren’t willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

Yes, the public does not know, and has been tricked into believing that it is all done by tightly guarded mathematical equations.

Google said it had added more detailed examples of problematic pages into the guidelines used by human raters to determine what is a good search result and what is a bad one. Google said its global staff of more than 10,000 raters do not determine search rankings, but their judgments help inform how the algorithm performs in the future.

There is the key fact that most ppl do not realize. Google employs 10,000 human raters to evaluate web pages. Google rankings are subjective, and are based on whatever Google decides to promote.