June 23, 2005
Google Training Docs
Some interesting reading for you today if you're a glutton for punishment. LOL
Just kidding. It's really quite interesting though not exactly earth-shattering news. And can give you a good insight into what Google considers to be a good or bad site.
Recently Henk van Ess stumbled across and published some internal documents that confirmed what most have known (assumed?) for a long while now. That Google actually hires people around the world to help it gain some human feedback on its relevancy. Googleguy even confirmed that the program and documents are real.
Those who watch this type of thing closely already knew that Google hired people to offer such feedback, as you'll see the occasional listing from third party employment places that state as much. It was also known that the eval.google.com sub-domain actually exists, even though you can't really get to it with your browser. That's because of their internal security procedures that protect this sensitive area.
But the internal documents are somewhat interesting.
This first document is sort of a Welcome letter from December 2003 that explains how the testers can/should use the Random-Query Evaluation works. It goes into how the testers should apply different ratings, what each means and makes mention that sometimes very general queries could have totally different meanings to different searchers.
The second link I'll provide leads to the Evaluator's Spam Guide, which purports to help the tester determine what is and what is not spam. It also goes into redirection schemes a bit, which is something some struggle with correctly identifying as either okay or a no-no.
Lots of other stuff over on Henk's blog if this sort of thing interests you. Just scroll back a week or two.