Google order its secretive "raters'" hours cut, so now they're going public

[roomwithaview]

@andybaldman

the whole ‘don’t be evil’ thing seems to have been quietly swept under the rug

It wasn’t even that quiet.

[roomwithaview]

@benkyo

I figured the results were “bad”, but not “worthless”, because there is crossover in popularity between J-pop and K-pop and boy bands are boy bands.

Gah! You’re the one!

But seriously, I stopped using Google quite awhile ago because the results have gotten so shitty.

DuckDuckGo and friends aren’t the most complete, (I do fall back on Google occasionally for really obscure stuff), but I don’t need every relevant result, just one with what I’m looking for is generally enough.
Google’s results invariably have me clicking through dozens of crappy results and then tuning my search parameters outside of all reality to bend it towards utility.

[benkyo]

You are right in that of course tenuously-related results are useless, but if I recall correctly a 0.5 rating should mean the results would be buried under dozens of pages of more relevant results. That’s why the sliding scale exists - if the rating was merely binary, 0.5 would be a 0. My point was that the test considered 0.5 to be just as wrong as a perfect 5 rating.

I’ve never used DuckDuckGo, but a colleague recommends it. Might have to give it a try, but since most of my work-related searches are highly specialised I suspect Google is the only realistic option for me.

[Wanderfound]

@orenwolf

The work has to get done, so there’s essentially three options, IMHO: 1) supplement income for these folks, as Ontario is trying to do, 2) increase costs for the goods/services provided by these workers so they can be better paid, or 3) move these positions to regions where cost-of-living is low enough that the income provided by these jobs is acceptable.

You’re missing #4: reduce the profits extracted by the owners. Which, really, should be #1.

[jannamark]

I too have been using DuckDuckGo for a while now, and am much happier with it than Google’s crappy results

[jannamark]

Or, tax the upper income brackets like President Eisenhower did.

[fuzzyfungus]

Shockingly enough; the reaction to this unwelcome attention involved some spiteful retaliation and what appears to be a plan to dissolve the current operation and re-hire some of the raters(for less) under a new name.

Ugly; but hard to muster much surprise.

[roomwithaview]

@benkyo

tenuously-related results are useless

Not just tenuous, flat out irrelevant, like missing half my search terms irrelevant!
And after I’ve figured out what completely unrelated topic Google thinks I should be looking for then I add, subtract, multiply and divide the terms to carrot-and-stick Google’s search beast in the right general direction.

I think the main problem is that Google got too user-friendly. They’ve got these massive libraries of code analyzing people’s successive queries to try and figure out what they meant the first time so they can shortcut the query tuning process and skip straight to the “right” results.

The catch there of course is that people’s needs change from minute to minute and what may appear to be a contiguous chain of searches is really many separate events correlated only in the mind of the searcher, so I believe what they have at this point is a serious case of GIGO.

They need to throw out whatever they’ve been doing for the last few years, 'cause it ain’t working!