Due to criticism of misinformed search results from the public, Google has been taking initiative to assist society in accurate and factual results, rather than inaccurate and offensive. As an attempt to solve this issue, they will be asking people to aid its computers algorithms, that which will give more factual results.
These people are 10,000 independent contractors known as quality raters. They will be given searches by Google, based on real queries to score the results. They will also be operating on guidelines by Google.
Tuesday, Google told them to hunt for “Upsetting-Offensive” content. Here are some of the guidelines Google posted:
1. hate or violence against a group of people
2. racial slurs or offensive terminology
3. graphic violence including animal cruelty
4. child abuse or explicit information about harmful activities such as human trafficking
Their objective was to navigate the public with questions such as “did the Holocaust happen” to more trustworthy sites that do not partake in falsifying information. By using the data from the quality raters, Google will be able to find in accurate information. Google senior engineer, Paul Haahr, told industry blog Search Engine Land that they are trying to avoid the term “fake news” because of its vagueness.
For instance, Google will advise the quality raters should flag a site as inappropriate or offensive if they are trying to mislead the public with inaccurate historical facts.
Unfortunately, quality raters ability to how results are ranked, are far beyond their power, however, their feedback will be used by the engineers and machine learning systems to improve search results.
Google has made a major stride in improving results for the query. Thanks to the ranking change, the results started to get a little better. It’s still unsure how much of the information that the quality raters will be able to control, but they have their foot in the right direction.