27 November, 2012

Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web • The Register

Revealed: Google's manual for its unseen humans who rate the web • The Register: Google's outsources the ratings to contractors Leapforce and Lionbridge, who employ home workers. Lionbridge describes itself as a "global crowdsourcing" agency and lists the advertisements here. According to one Leapforce job ad there are 1,500 raters. The work is flexible but demanding - raters must pass an examination and are consistently evaluated by Google. For example, a rater is given a "TTR" score - "Time to Rate" measures how quickly they make their decisions. Here's one contractor's tale, and an interview at SEO site SearchEngineLand with another.

It's amazing how the image Google likes to promote - and politicians believe - one of high tech boffinry and magical algorithms, contrasts with the reality. Outsourced home workers are keeping the machine running. Glamorous, it isn't. �