Just got around a post at webmasterworld about human evaluators of google search engine results and with a a number mentioned at 10,000 of them. Questions raised, and eventually a discussion on how well this affect their search engine. We all know the fact that google hired human evaluators and some of them from universities but we dont know the numbers. And to have this google job listing at http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=35429. Now the question lies within, was the ranking a human tweak or their own software algorithm?

On my opinion, not on the side of google nor on the side of critics, why? I have my own views, simple as that. There are advantages of course of having human evaluators especially if you want to bring a superb user experience. These are some I thought of:

1. Eliminating sites with spywares, adware, virus, or other unwanted malwares that is not detected by their software when providing search results, where the possibility of the sites to be on top searches.

2. Sites not providing contents with the sole intention of gaining from search engine traffic taking into account like made for ads sites.

3. The possibility of removing totally scrapped sites our of the ranking.

4. Verification of the so called google algorithm on the performance in the production.

There are other reasons of the importance of these evaluators, the above are just some of those, though you may react on them, it up to you, they are just my opinion. Now on the basis of will they affect the ranking or do the ranking being tweak by these google evaluators? Hmmn, you need answer? YES! Why, let me check and let you back on my reason #1 above, if for example a certain site appears at first page of the search results with the highly search term and you click the link without knowing that the site have this kind of issue (malware, virus, adware, etc), would you not get mad and point your blame on Big G, why they list that kind of site on their search? With evaluators, they can at least eliminate that kind of site (do they?).

Another thing is the relevance of the search results, evaluators can feedback what they is the site doing at the top of the result if it not relevant? Hmmn, interesting, google algorithm flaw? Ah, what a crappy and an unorganized thinking that comes to my mind.

Anyway, evaluators means algorithm flaw? Maybe Yes maybe not but who knows, they are just pure speculation, only google knows. And another question, how will affect SEO’s? This would be a good subject to discuss on the next post, search engine optimization professionals SEO versus human search engine evaluator. Don’t you think?