Google denies humans directly involved in page ranking
Well, even the New York Times makes mistakes. Yesterday, I posted about a report in the Times technology blog Bits that said that human input was part of the method used to rank individual Web pages. I also posted that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land scoffed at the idea that Google would use human judgment as part of its vaunted page ranking algorithm. It seems that Sullivan was right. Today Bits reports:
My post Tuesday about the role of humans in Google’s search results misinterpreted a comment by Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research. In an interview with Technology Review, Mr. Norvig talked about how the search engine has a vast network of part-time employees evaluating how good its results are. As I read the interview, I incorrectly thought he was saying that human ratings were fed into Google’s algorithms and used, alongside PageRank and other quantitative measures of pages, to determine the order in which sites are listed in response to a given query
It seems that Google bigwig Matt Cutts contacted the Times and denied that humans are used directly in Google’s ranking system. He is quoted as saying:
“I’m not going to say categorically that Google refuses to ever use humans,†he said. “There is a role for humans in Google search. We are very pragmatic. If there were a very scalable robust way to use humans to deliver search results, I think we’d be open to that.â€
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