Henk van Ess on Google's Secret Lab

In this show, we spoke with Henk van Ess, founder of Search Bistro. If you follow SEO closely then you have probably, heard of Henk van Ess and/or his new SearchBistro site over the past few days. On June 1st, Henk posted about Google's Secret Lab, revealed to the public for the first time, a Google project that uses human testers to rate the quality of Google search results and help identify spam. Henk writes:

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.

Since then, more details have followed, including actual Google documents on identifying spam and rating search results. These represent a view into Google's opinions of what makes good search results, with a depth that has never been seen before. It is important to note that these are just training documents, and may differ from the actual policies and algorithms is use. It is also unclear, to what extent (if any) Google has been using the human feedback to tweak search results.

Listen to archives of this show now (Windows Media Player) - coming soon:

Segment 1 - Google's Secret Lab

Segment 2 - Human testers affect search results?

Segment 3 - Search Bistro and future of Google Rankings

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6	11/11/05 21:48 EDT	Tyler: I think Google is goin...