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

finance.yahoo.com

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

#91

Post by kappuchino »

vultour wrote: post #88
demadog wrote: post #51

When those reports come out that “The average Google employee makes $220k a year” or whatever, it’s totally misleading since it doesn’t account for all the outsourced labor at $10 an hour that is critical to tuning their algorithms.

Google salaries outside of the US are a fraction of that.

No, not generally, because it depends. With mandatory paid social security and cheaper rent, it is somehow lower (for example) germany - but not for each every job, since some are in high demand (ml/ai specialists for example) . Google employees in switzerland are paid higher than in the US for similar tasks due the cost of living higher. (Same with other companies like facebook, twitter, etc.)

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

#92

Post by Retric »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #86
demadog wrote: post #51

When those reports come out that “The average Google employee makes $220k a year” or whatever, it’s totally misleading since it doesn’t account for all the outsourced labor at $10 an hour that is critical to tuning their algorithms.

I don't think that's misleading at all. Why would I assume that non-Google employee compensation would go into the calculation for what the average Google employee makes? As someone else pointed out, this pays substantially more than AWS Mechanical Turk. To be honest, it's difficult for me to imagine an easier job than this one. I mean, most people who would do this job could easily now make more at McDonald's or Wal…

Google has publicly described these people as it’s “extended workforce.”

Employee is generally used as the legal definition, but if you’re only job is to work for company X under their explicit micromanaged directions you fit the colloquial definition of employee even if your paycheck is signed by a different company.

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

#93

Post by CephalopodMD »

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 used to do this, but they rolled it back because the hard honest truth is most people don't like taking surveys. Behavior is a better and more available signal.

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

#94

Post by yupper32 »

anm89 wrote: post #82
bhartzer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#96

Post by daniel-cussen »

Nexxxeh wrote: post #57
demadog wrote: post #51

When those reports come out that “The average Google employee makes $220k a year” or whatever, it’s totally misleading since it doesn’t account for all the outsourced labor at $10 an hour that is critical to tuning their algorithms.

I did voice training tasks for Google through a 3rd party I can't remember the name of. I was recruited via /r/beermoney or something. I enjoyed it, and it was easy work that fit around my schedule. It also gave a feeling of improving the lives of users, which was cool.

It for sure can be good, win-win.

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

#97

Post by jccalhoun »

"The raters Yahoo Finance spoke to work from home, but they have no clue who their direct boss is, or if they have one boss or many bosses. They don’t even know their boss’ (or bosses’) name." "Across the board, the raters Yahoo Finance spoke to worry about waking up to a pink-slip-email, and two said they know of instances where people haven’t received an email at all — the worker’s account was just deactivated. "

This is some Kafka-esque shit. Unreal.

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

#99

Post by kentonv »

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…

The quote matches my own understanding of the system from when I worked on Google Search circa 2005. Human ratings were used to facilitate an automated test that could tell you if your new algorithm actually made search results better or not. That let search quality engineers iterate on ideas quickly. But the human ratings were not directly used to produce search results, since that wouldn't scale (only a relatively small number of queries actually had rated results).

Obviously 2005 was a long time ago though and everything could have changed since then.

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