dazzlindonna - 4:04 pm on May 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Google has been known to come up with unusual metrics and crowd sourced data

This has been swimming around in my head lately. One of my first inclinations was to think perhaps Google was using some sort of WOT API (Web of Trust) or similar, to see what kind of trust ranking ordinary people give a site, and if not so good, pandalize it. This wouldn't have to come from WOT itself, Google may have its own that we don't know about, or perhaps Google's herd of quality raters have this kind of toolbar system as well. Whatever/however, this kind of crowdsourced rating system might be in play. In addition, they could be using something similar to how crowdflower connects with mturk to crowdsource small tasks. For instance, someone has hired them to crowdsource a question "How relevant are these 33 search results (UK only)?". If Google is crowdsourcing both trust rankings like WOT does, and various other crowdsourced signals such as relevance, etc., then I can see how Panda could be so hard to figure out, and also why it can't be run all the time. Just a thought for a monday morning, y'all. :)