Google "Quality Raters", The Human Labor That Defines Quality Contents For The Search Engine

Google is known as the most prominent search engine. While people know that Google uses algorithms to rank and decide what should be shown on its Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), not many people know that the algorithms involve human trainers.

Those people are called "Quality Raters", and they are the hidden human labor that helps Google determine what's best for its Search users.

The initial Google Search was able to distinguish itself from other search engines by using PageRank algorithm that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created. PageRank ranked websites in terms of number of links they received from other websites. While this was a much better way than others in ranking websites, over time, it didn't go well with the more modern trends.

To embrace the evergrowing number of websites and the change of culture as well as needs and demands, Google added a number of other signals for it to rank websites. It has included signals by adding data gathered from social media, mobile phones, tablets, search history, location, terms, freshness and many others.

All that is increasing the complexity of Google Search.

Quality Raters

Despite its ability to show great results from search queries, it needs to be aware of the trends, culture, digital economy and various forms of changes. For that reason, Google needed humans to work in order to sustain and promote the relevance of its search engine.

There are at least three types of Search labor that Google uses in its global production process.

The first one is the employees of Google. They are the ones that work on the aspects of its algorithms and major technical parts. The second is the non-paid labor which consists of internet users. Those people contribute to the value generation of the company. Those users that search Google using queries, are all giving Google the information it needs to analyze data and collect all the necessary information to sell advertising.

The third labor is the search quality raters, or better known as just Quality Raters.

They are "precision evaluators" that Google hired from third-party companies that specialized in crowdsourcing global workforces. Google performs the quality and precision evaluation on a regular basis.

Those Quality Raters are meant to represent real Google Search users in the locale where they evaluate search results. What they do, is to rate web pages according to their content quality, website information, reputation, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Quality Raters

The first priority is to know which pages are high in quality and which are low in critical areas, like shopping or financial transaction pages, financial information pages, medical information pages and others.

These key areas were introduced in 2014 under the concept of Your Money or Your Life pages, and are the ones that Google thinks are the highest standards that can "potentially negatively impact users’ happiness, health, or wealth."

Google does not want low-quality contents on these key areas to rank well.

The lesser but having an increased importance, is quality contents that are accurate. Quality Raters need to scout for bad contents, misleading articles, hoax articles and news, offensive or upsetting contents. These pages are included in the Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E­A­T) section of Quality Raters guidelines.

It is the responsibility of those Quality Raters to conduct real-life queries and evaluate the pages returned in SERP.

Quality Raters have no direct implication to Google Search or any of its ranked pages. They can put a low score on a website, but that low rating won't be reflected to the actual live Google's SERP. However, Google uses the data given by the Quality Raters to experiment, putting the data against its own algorithms.

While their work isn't directly algorithm-related, they are giving Google the data, and the idea, of what people want best.

There are billions of people that use Google without knowing how it works, or how it manages to process all the information they are looking for. As a company that thrives with its search engine, it isn't that transparent about the details on how it works as most are hidden behind technical terms and trade secrets.