HitProf - 11:33 am on Jun 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

I really don't see what all the fuzz is about. Google never made a secres of it's human evaluation of search results by my knowledge. That's not the same as giving one individul the right to mess around with the SERPS.

From the documents it's quite clear that the raters are given real past query results to evaluate and that those results are rated by groups of people. If the raters don't agree, they're evaluated again and discussed. It's not quite sure how exactly Google uses those ratings, but hey, does that matter much? As long as they are used to improve search results.. Any other search engine will have this kind of quality control, only the implementation may be different.

I must say I'm quite impressed by the way the documents urge the raters how to distinguish between usefull and non usefull pages and how to detect spam/nospam, e.g. sneaky and non sneaky redirects. (For the spam detection part it may have been updated and expanded by now with other techniques, but the intention is probably still the same).

The guidelines are very well in line with the SEO mantra: provide unique content. So I think I like those guidelines :)