I always have a feeling they could get surprisingly far by having one person doing random searches, then tagging all the obvious spam to be deindexed. But Google is very adamant about never hiring a person to do a job well, if AI can be trained to do the same job badly
Don't they have whole teams of people looking at sites through the lens of the leaked 'quality rater guidelines' - ?
I thought it was like a few thousand people in the philippines downranking sites for thousands of reasons - without being transparent about possible biases and such.
Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else.
And wasn't there a story about a bunch people who were doing similar as 1099 contractors in the US striking because they were not getting a living wage or something?
Looking at the quality of current google searches I highly doubt it.
I mean I could single handedly remove thousands of domains in a month and improve google search result, I have a hard time believing that they have 1000s of people doing it and the quality is this shitty.
I'm aware, but that's not the point. I went to that company's website around the time that case was in the news, and 100% agreed with google downranking it.
The point is, downranking decisions by google have a non-trivial chance of being litigated in court, and at that point, I doubt that the decision will actually be made on the merits of the particular site. A sympathetic website owner with a sympathetic regulator is frequently going to win against google, regardless of how shady the site actually is.
first ten results include:
theworkathomewife dot com › google-ads-quality-raterHow to Get Paid to Be a Google Ads Quality Rater
Sep 18, 2022 · As a quality rater, you ensure ads on Google – and other search engines – are both accurate and visually appealing. You will be given sample search terms and potential
Forbes -
After Months Of Protest, Google Search Quality Raters Finally Get A Raise
with a hand wavy - these raters don't actually effect the results..
I read dozens of pages of the raters guidelines pdf years ago - and I can see how they are being sneaky with things the 'down rank things that lack trust signals' - which in of itself sounds okay - especially with some situations..
but that exact thing can be used to push down entertainment sites, and can help adwords make more money by forcing lots of sites to pay to show up in the top 10 or miss 90% of the internet traffic.
So I agree that they are pushing shitty results in many search verticals - but yeah it does seem they are using thousands of people to create them this way on purpose.
It's no longer a better search engine - it once was - today it's popular because it's a default on many devices, and the network effects make it so people build their sites and update their listings like it's the only yellow pages in town.
Their high-brow censoring leaves much entertainment and other things better found using other portals to search and find imho.
