Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

finance.yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 117 posts

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#101

Post by kappuchino »

iamleppert wrote: post #95

Google absolutely employs more raters than software engineers. This is the big fraud of Google search. It’s not PageRank, which hasn’t been used for years. It’s exploited human labor. That’s the real lie behind Google.

First sentence is true. Second is not, as is the third. I believe you don't know what you are talking about. A software engineer for example writes code that scales across thousands of systems and might be (human) language independet. A SQR tests samples of searches if they match google quality standards. As this cannot scale across all websites it is done with a subset of the web, like a one in a million ratio. It has to be done by 5 people to get an average so it is independent from one rating = one result. And it has to be done in context to countries / cultures.

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#102

Post by kappuchino »

echen wrote: post #47
Proven wrote: post #4

How much should they be paid? It's not like you need a PhD to confirm if a search result sucks. Results are supposed to be good enough for the average user, so you need common sense and some on-job training to do a good job. And having 10 common-sense guys churning through user feedback @$11/h is better than 2 geniuses @$55/h. As one comment says, it probably beats fliping burgers.

It can be suprisingly difficult. A lot of the difficulty is in understanding the user intent behind a search query (since you're usually rating other people's queries, not your own). For example, here are some queries in my history - would the average person understand what I'm looking for and what a good search result would be? "neovim worktrees" "django models through" "pandas econdb"

Good examples. Raters have - afaik- to assume multiple possible intentions on two word searches (and general searches on one). This results in better ratings for results (top 10 generally) that partially match different search intentions. so for "pandas databases" it would match the panda python libraries, but also databases literally of pandas ... and maybe a company that is called pandas and has databases. And this is the reason why we can never have "pure" results (in most cases) for a specific search, because the algorithm and the search rating is aiming for result-topic-diversity most of the time (if not all of the time).

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#103

Post by kappuchino »

geoduck14 wrote: post #84

If there is a web site with a LOT of content, does Google get SQR for each page or do they get SQR for "a couple of pages" and apply that rating for the entire site? When you rate "accruacy" of information or "authorativeness" of a site, how do you know the site is "an authority"? are you guessing?

SQR is used to test if google search results are "right" across most searches, not if a website is "right" in general. Rating of a site from the point of google relies on other data points like speed, support of https, links to the site (aka page rank) and a lot more. Have a look at the SQR Guide (PDF Link in my comment above) for examples how Google classifies information results. (Especially the YMYL - Your money or your life classification and Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T))

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#104

Post by anm89 »

yupper32 wrote: post #94
anm89 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct. I was a quality rater. We spent almost all of our time literally ranking websites.

Your ranking is a signal that goes into the algorithm, not the actual end result.

I understand that. My post never implies that that was the case.

> Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them.

Wrong. I was never asked any questions beyond to rank to site quality for a query

> Quality Raters don’t actually rank website

Wrong again. This is what we did. We assessed website rankings for specific queries.

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#105

Post by anm89 »

yupper32 wrote: post #94
anm89 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't correct. I was a quality rater. We spent almost all of our time literally ranking websites.

Your ranking is a signal that goes into the algorithm, not the actual end result.

I understand that.

> Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them.

Wrong. At least in my case. I was never asked any questions beyond to rank to site quality for a query

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#106

Post by dmarchand90 »

kappuchino wrote: post #56

Ex Google Search quality Rater here, based in Germany. From 2004 to 2006 I worked on SQR and "special projects", with a much better pay (maybe because of german circumstances). I've been tracking the SQR-guide since then (public version here https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... ), so I have still some current understanding. If you have questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them since my…

I don't have any specific questions but would be really interested in hearing more!

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#107

Post by sfmike »

kappuchino wrote: post #56

Ex Google Search quality Rater here, based in Germany. From 2004 to 2006 I worked on SQR and "special projects", with a much better pay (maybe because of german circumstances). I've been tracking the SQR-guide since then (public version here https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh... ), so I have still some current understanding. If you have questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them since my…

What do you think about gpt3 and ai content on serps and how will it be rated and ranked?

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#108

Post by Nextgrid »

civilized wrote: post #23

Dumb question - why can't I just upvote and downvote pages, and Google enhances its ranking for me based on that? Maybe that's why the search "X reddit" is so popular - it's got a bit of that social validation.

How are you supposed to “engage” with Google search once you’ve downvoted all the spammy ad-ridden garbage and actually get useful results on the first non-ad link?

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#109

Post by Nextgrid »

hypothesis wrote: post #55
civilized wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure they have all sorts of fancy stuff but at the end of the day, there's a lot of SEO garbage at the top of the rankings that I would really love to downvote.

That’s assuming that the goal is to make search better and not say make more money.

A lot of spammy SEO garbage has ads and analytics which are often Google’s, so there’s little incentive to ban these websites.

Re: 'Rater' is paid $10 hourly to teach Google's algorithm

#110

Post by Nextgrid »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #85
bhartzer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know they probably use CTR as a ranking factor. However, a site could just literally add JS code on the page and disable the back button. So I don’t think that would work out that well for Google.

That sounds like a trick that would only work until Google noticed.

Since a few years there’s been plenty of cheap tricks that would’ve earned you a manual ban/downrank back in the day that Google now turns a blind eye to.
Post reply on HN