Yahoo_Mike - 7:17 pm on Apr 15, 2004 (gmt 0)

hitthedeck

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Mike isnt this human approach going to lead to more headaches then it is worth. With so many variables the subjective and arbitrary nature of such a process would make a uniformed policy very difficult to harmonize. Do you not feel that ultimately Yahoo technology will render this current stickler mute. Yahoo has a good product most webmasters are charitable enough to see some problems as mere growing pains.
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Our current human editorial approach has some subjectivity - that's the nature of it when people are involved. However, we try to make each criteria we look at as objective and consistent as possible.

One day will algos be so good that these editors aren't needed? I think so, though I don't think anyone knows when that will be.

As you are probably aware, there's an ongoing battle between search engine providers and people who are trying to figure out how to "game the rules" used by the algos. Many of these people are very smart and do a good job of it. That's why you may see spam sites in the results and why the algorithms change over time. And I would guess these are many of the same people who are saying we shouldn't have human editorial review (not in *every* case, but I found this to be true from my experience). The human editors simply provide another data point to look for spam results that the algos didn't catch.

Do bad things happen to relatively good sites? Sometimes the answer is yes. Similarly some times spam sites get by us. That's why we're working hard to improve the process from both algo and editorial perspectives.