Friday, June 03, 2005

Google Secret Lab, Prelude - Henk van Ess's Search Bistro

Google Secret Lab, Prelude - Henk van Ess's Search Bistro: "What is it? It's a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet.
I call it Google's Secret Evaluation Lab, but the real title is less adventurous; 'Rater Hub Google'. The coming days I will reveal all I know about this lab - must find the time first to do so. To keep you busy, here's a Flash-movie from a part of the site. Stay tuned, next posting will be tomorrow."

Have you seen the Flash movie that shows part of the Eval.Google.com site?

Come to think about it, two months ago I saw some ads in Craigslist.org for Google Testers to work part time, freelance. Google wanted (and still wants) to hire people who are specialists in certain areas to evaluate content.

Honestly, I don't see anything wrong with that. I don't think they were even keeping it a secret.

ON one hand, everyone complains the search results are not as relevent as they should be......but when the search engines figure out ways to improve it (by getting humans involved) it becomes a hot issue with some who feel the search engines are getting two powerful and need to be restrained. How else are they sopposed to improve results?

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