Google: Quality Raters Help Us Understand If Our Signals Produce Good Results

Feb 24, 2020 - 8:34 am 2 by

Google Soap

Danny Sullivan at Google again explained what the role of the search quality raters are. Again, for those who do not know, Google search quality raters are not Google employees, they are third-party contractors. They grade search results and the sites ranked. Those grades and scores do not get fed back into the algorithm, but are shared with Google's ranking engineers.

I think of it as how well you do on a test. You study all year long, get all this information into your brain and then take an exam. The exam shows the teacher how well you understand the concepts. So if a teacher has 100 students and the average grade was 90, then the teacher knows he/she is doing a good job.

With the grades given by the search quality raters, it tells the engineers how well the signals the engineers coded are doing in terms of producing good search results.

Danny explained it on Twitter as "We use raters to understand if our mix of signals seems to be producing good results. If so, then particular updates and changes get released. Then we keep working to improve with testing, new changes. It's constant improvement." It is a constant rinse and repeat, to keep tweaking out better and better search results.

He did respond to Jenny saying "That's very simplified but in the ballpark." when she said:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Google Ads

Confirmed: Google Ads Errors & High Latency Issues

Jul 2, 2025 - 7:55 pm
Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 2, 2025

Jul 2, 2025 - 10:00 am
Google Updates

Google June 2025 Core Update Volatility Just Began - Do You See It?

Jul 2, 2025 - 8:35 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

July 2025 Google Webmaster Report

Jul 2, 2025 - 7:51 am
Google Search Engine Optimization

Google On Links & Core Updates

Jul 2, 2025 - 7:41 am
Bing Search

Bing Places Copilot Search As First Tab & Replaces All With Web

Jul 2, 2025 - 7:31 am
Previous Story: Google Image Search Adds New Image License Metadata