Document: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

Announcement: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/11/updating-...

Maybe dang can replace the link to the actual announcement and remove the blog spam.

not downvoting you, but searchengineland is actually a very good/reputable site. It is very believable that the original submitter found this out through them. (IE: this isn't spam)

What value does the link add? Which URL has more information? Should all of HN go through this blog to read the actual information? No. It's blog spam.

The value, in my opinion, comes from the fact that SearchEngineLand broke the story. The original Google post is extremely low key, as one might expect given that previous versions of the document were leaked not released with an accompanying announcement.

As best I could tell, no other outlet had covered the document release before SearchEngineLand nor had anyone submitted the original to HN.

As an aside, what else can one expect visually from a site devoted to SEO?

YMMV.

I used to work as a Search Quality Rater for Google. It was pretty interesting. It's worth noting that raters are not Google employees but contracted through third parties and working from home. Many of my colleagues were stay-at-home moms making a few extra bucks. This was a few years ago though so things may have changed.

I did the same for a few months earlier this year. It was theoretically a decent sum of money here (3rd world SE Asia) if you could do the minimum amount of hours they require.

OT, the top rated comment on the above article published on googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com is :

Google just made public their latest version of the Quality Raters Guidelines (PDF linked from the blog post)

Which is just summarizing what the blog post is about (probably a G+ share that got plus'd a lot). Nothing against the commentator, it's rather their ranking/voting system that needs to be fixed.

The "your money or your life" web page stuff is interesting. They call these YMYL pages anything that can have large impact on the user: financial info pages, legal info pages, medical info pages, and so on. They say they have very high quality page rating standards for these pages. OK, but how?

Later in the document they talk about doing reputation research on the site. They say, "[F]or Page Quality rating, you must also look for outside, independent reputation information about the website."

So they are evaluating content. They are encouraging their reviewers to make a judgement. This strikes me as unreliable, maybe even a slippery slope for them.

From the announcement linked to below: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10601232)

Ratings from evaluators do not determine individual site rankings, but are used help us understand our experiments. The evaluators base their ratings on guidelines we give them; the guidelines reflect what Google thinks search users want

Ah so they probably have a specific set of sites that they check against. That makes sense- thanks.

Surprising to see so much human input. Essentially google took a leaf out of Yahoo!'s playbook after first crushing them using just algorithms. Is this proof that beyond a certain degree of algorithmic extraction you need a human hand to advance or is it evidence for a return to the old days of a more curated index? (Or are there other possibilities?)

Google has been upfront about greater use of learning AI (as opposed to hand-tuned algorithms like PageRank) to index and rank their search results. In order to return a good result, a learning AI system must first be trained on what a good result looks like. Since search returns results to humans, humans have to provide the guidance on what is a good or bad result.

Often an AI can be trained by a corpus, like training a spell correcter by feeding it the text of a dictionary. But the data that Google works is the entire web, which changes all the time, so they need constant feedback on what is good or bad.

Google also personalizes results now, so the AI needs to learn not just what is a good result, but what is a good result for that particular person, given everything else the AI knows about that person. That would require inputs from a wide variety of people.

I think it's proof that google has done an amazing sales job.

Their ML algos really come down to codified, scaled human intuition and decisions. However, to avoid having to answer for them (google has the ability to make or break many internet companies), they repeatedly go on and on about ML and pretend it's just math, as if there is a first principles answer to eg which candle company should rank highest passed down from Gauss.

The reason this is valuable to google is if they admit it is just collective human judgement, governments are much more likely to demand input.

I suspect this is also a fail safe which allows them to use learning algorithms that give less than well understood results that still perform well (think neural networks and deep learning).

If you know it's going to get leaked anyway, just release a sanitized version of it.

Why this? Why not measure empirically based on how often people follow your first result?

That approach is prone to creating a positive feedback loop through an order bias.

Click through rate isn't necessarily indicative of quality.

I'm sure they measure that, also.