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

[Killswitch]

It's widely believed that Google search results are produced entirely by computer algorithms - in large part because Google would like this to be widely believed. But in fact a little-known group of home-worker humans plays a large part in the Google process. The way these raters go about their work has always been a mystery. Now, The Register has seen a copy of the guidelines Google issues to them.

The 160-page manual gives detailed advice for raters - on relevance, spamminess, and - more controversially - the elusive "quality". For relevance raters are advised to give a rating based on "Vital", "Useful", "Relevant", Slightly Relevant", "Off-Topic or Useless" or "Unratable".

Raters may also be asked to give a spam rating: "Not Spam", "Maybe Spam", "Spam", "Porn" and "Malicious".

Interestingly, raters are not advised to rate websites with out of date security certificates as Spam or Malicious. At the time the rating guide was written, the US army portal - for instance - currently used an out-of-date certificate.

Rest of the story on The Register

[Why]

pretty sure that happened like two years ago.