Yesterday we wrote that Google search quality raters don't directly impact the search rankings and today we have confirmation from Frédéric Dubut of Bing that Bing search quality raters do not directly impact the Bing search rankings.
I asked him on Twitter about this and he said no, since they are not "features" they do not get inputted into the ranking scores. He said:
The ratings are the training/test set labels. They are not features, so the trained ranking model doesn't have a notion of "human quality ratings".
— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) March 13, 2019
He then added clearly that they have no direct impact on a query level in their search rankings:
Btw the reason why human ratings *cannot* be a feature is overfitting (section 5). You have labels only for a fraction of all pages. If ratings were a feature, the trained algo would be essentially a quick sort 😆 and would be worthless anytime it doesn't have ratings available.
— Frédéric Dubut (@CoperniX) March 13, 2019
"The human rating of your site for a given query has no direct impact on its ranking for the same query," he said. He talks about what features are in an article he wrote named How to Build Your Own Search Ranking Algorithm with Machine Learning. In that article he talks more about how 90% of their algorithm is machine learning based.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
