For anyone interested, there's a hilariously bitter and practical paper on the trials and tribulations of building a search engine: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=988407 EDIT: Article is clearly from an earlier era, but it's really cool to see how far we've come and how much more computing power we have available now. There are entire categories of problems that simply don't exist anymore.
I really enjoyed that article. I read it over a year ago while I was doing Udacity’s [Intro to Computer Science](https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101) course where you learn to build a web crawler and implement a basic page ranking algorithm.
At first Google was a search algorithm, but at some point they decided to have humans review and rank the important queries. Important as in query volume. Why use humans? People can decide if your navigation is intuitive. They can decide if your page looks like crap. If 230,000 people are searching for "coconut oil" per month (actual numbers) then it's worth having an intern spend 15 minutes to make sure page 1 of "c…
I think human reviews of all the important websites and SERPs, that's harder for a competitor to reproduce. Google was forced into that by improved "search engine optimization". SEO used to be about things like keyword stuffing, but as Google made their search engine smarter, SEO companies made their search spamming smarter. There are now SEO operations using machine learning to reverse engineer Google's algorithms a…
I agree. And what are the implications? Wasn't Google sued by people unhappy with their rankings (Howard Stern?) and wasn't Google's defense that their algorithm was unbiased? (Not a rhetorical question, I never followed how that played out.) Once you introduce human reviewers, you're going to have more unhappy businesses. I'd rather a SEO spammer push me down (nothing personal) than know an actual Googler secretly decided my website wasn't good enough--a personal bias against me in particular. Who are the reviewers, what do we know about them, what are they looking for, not looking for, have they reviewed you personally, etc. I think Google may call it a "manual action" in Webmaster Tools, an ambiguous way of saying somebody at Google manipulated the algorithm against you. Do they have different levels of manual actions? Are manual actions always disclosed?