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

71–80 of 117 posts

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

#71

Post by bhartzer »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #33
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.

Google already has similar signals: 1. Do you click on the link in the results page? 2. After clicking on that link, do you go back to the search or not? 3. How long do you stay there before coming back? Adding an explicit up/downvote would capture some additional information, but it would overlap with the above, and most users would ignore the button. I’d guess Google has at some point experimented with this and fou…

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.

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

#72

Post by kappuchino »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #12
advisedwang wrote: post #8

I thought the management theory was to in-source your core-competencies and out-source everything else. Surely quality search results is one of Google's core competencies!

Google's core competency is ads. Any time you click a search result, it's a failure: Google wanted you to click the ad above it.

Totaly oversimplification. If google wanted you only to click on ads, it would be a type of yellow pages. What it is (as it was with newspapers and magazines a time ago): A place where you can place paid ads based on context. If you remove the context, it becomes worthless. So while everyone is complaining about search quality, its an uphill battle for any search company. Like PR tries to sneak in Ad-Material into reguluar journalism, companies try to manipulate search results with SEO ranging form keyword-stuffing to bait and switch search pages. (which are one reason why google needs humans and not ai to verify).

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

#73

Post by kappuchino »

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.

I think everyone in SQR is based on the national average/context. In germany - even 15 years ago - SQRs were paid quite okay (around 16€/hour back then) including health insurance and social security pay.

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

#74

Post by cpeterso »

The search quality rater guide says:

“Your ratings will not directly affect how a particular webpage, website, or result appears in Google Search, nor will they cause specific webpages, websites, or results to move up or down on the search results page. Instead, your ratings will be used to measure how well search engine algorithms are performing for a broad range of searches.”

Is this accurate? Or is the guide bending the truth to discourage malicious raters from trying to influence site rankings? Google only uses the rater data to evaluate its search algorithm and doesn’t use the rater data to teach the algorithm? Seems like a missed opportunity.

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...

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

#75

Post by bhartzer »

rednalexa wrote: post #54
jancsika wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google can't use it's vast array of user data to tell the difference between SEO bots and non-bot users, what's even the point of it collecting all that fucking data in the first place?

I would assume that if Google is paying 10$/hour for humans to rank content, someone else is paying 11$/hour to fool it with a human generating content, clicks, etc. Additionally, people writing bots learn just like Google learns, and start generating what appears to be legitimate interactions. Same algorithms that fit to critique between 'bot' and 'non-bot' class can be used to create bots that fall into the 'non-bo…

That’s what’s confusing in the articles that have come out about quality raters.

Quality Raters don’t actually rank websites.

Quality Raters look at websites and answer questions about them. Google then uses that data as a small part of their algorithm to adjust some factors about those sites.

Quality Raters don’t actually rank pages on google.

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

#76

Post by vgeek »

rater266 wrote: post #59
vgeek wrote: post #6

This is 100% a race to the bottom. Years ago the Leapforce (now Appen as mentioned in the article) and Lionsbridge "contractors" could average over $18/hr. They would only work on Google tasks and adhere to Google's policies. The work seemed inconsistent (people would have 5 hours of work some days, none the next) and about what you would expect for AI training. No worker protections, benefits, etc.-- all while doing…

Former longtime Leapforce/RaterLabs preferred/senior rater here. There was always some exploitation going on, but it got way worse under Ruth Porat's tenure. Standard Leapforce US English raters were paid $13.50/hr. If you were lucky enough to get promoted to "Preferred Agent" (PA), you made $17.40/hr. The criteria for PA promotion was basically to be in the top 5% or so on their quality metrics, plus various subject…

Thank you for all of this information! I've roughly followed it as a marketer (YMYL ranking factors from the guidelines type stuff) and as an observer-- it is interesting that the shifts lined up with the Porat era.

The two people I knew who did Leapforce also did human powered answers for ChaCha(?) where they were paid per answer versus an hourly rate, and then migrated to Leapforce at a lower date. They were both in US and I would remember them complaining on AIM over task availability-- sometimes they'd have work, others they wouldn't. They would take breaks from playing Counterstrike to see if new tasks were available and disappear if there was work available. With Leapforce, were there different rigid time allotments per task? E.g. 30 seconds to classify an image vs 2 minutes for ranking a webpage to be shown as a search result? If you were flagged as a low performer, was there any recourse or remediation, or just getting disabled and hoping for a review?

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

#77

Post by kappuchino »

cpeterso wrote: post #74

The search quality rater guide says: “Your ratings will not directly affect how a particular webpage, website, or result appears in Google Search, nor will they cause specific webpages, websites, or results to move up or down on the search results page. Instead, your ratings will be used to measure how well search engine algorithms are performing for a broad range of searches.” Is this accurate? Or is the guide bendi…

Mostly five raters indenpendently rate the same task and are randomly chosen from a pool. This should reduce SQR conspiracies to near zero. Also, afaik, google engineers use the SQR Feedback to enhance algorithms (example: spam detection) Second: In my active time - long ago - white text was still a thing to make keyword stuffing "invisible". As a result of the SQRs work (and maybe a lot of complaints about bad search results ;-D), the next revision of search ranking "killed" that method - at least for some time - for all pages and not only the rated ones (which were only a sample of all in existance).

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

#78

Post by newguynewphone »

acheron wrote: post #49
vba616 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>laughing their full heads off every time they think about how there are people who do free work for Google who think they are making the world a better place or something. So when you go to a store that Google Maps says is open, and find it's closed, you refuse to correct the hours and go "MUHAHAHAHA...I refuse to help Google, take that , corporate scum!"

What? Why on earth would I correct it?

So the trillion dollar company can be better, of course

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

#79

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN