I hate to self link, but it seems that most people here dont know that getting top results on google is not just about SEO and back links, but you also have to get through actual humans to rank high.. http://dmense.com/2006/12/03/google-secret-lab/ http://www.searchbistro.com/secretlab.html
I'm sorry but I don't get the point of your self promotion post. Your "articles" if you want to call them that really don't say much or provide any exciting explanations to anything. As far as http://eval.google.com/ goes, this doesn't appear to be anything bug one of Google's data centers they might use to evaluate their algorithms when doing "updates". The results did not look any different than the results I might see from http://www.google.com
It's pretty obvious that with millions of websites and millions of possible queries, google is NOT going to manually select top results. They don't have to either, they trust on the 'collective' human intelligence to link to what's useful, and ignore what's not. This can be manipulated to some extent, but generally speaking it still works - especially since the links count more if they are 'on topic'.
the article explains what eval is, and there is a flash demo showing the interface used by humans to compare and rate SERPS it does not suggest that humans have a hand in all keywords, but surely the most popular. how many people do you know ranked in the top 3 for keywords that TRUELY ARE valuable? search google for something like auto insurance, do you see the top listings ever being a page filled with articles on how to get the best rates or find the best dealer? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...:official&hs=CpJ&q=auto+insurance&btnG=Search I truely believe that at very least the top 3 results are closely moderated by human input, on google's side.
The article and video did not prove anything...I can make that exact video using my pc and Snag-it. In fact i've fooled a lot of my friends that way.
the point is still valid, show me a query where a very competitive term is occupied by anything other than what you may expect.
Shae, the point is not valid and your demonstration proved nothing other than you don't understand what you claim to know. Google loathes using manual means to rank sites. Do some sites get manually adjusted? Yes but it is always to lower their ranking (e.g. banning spammers) they do not manually raise the rankings of individual sites/pages. They probably use some sort of evaluation process of how good ranking results are to help evaluate AUTOMATED algorithms in an effort to improve the overall quality of the search results. In other words they pick sample search results and evaluate the overall results to decide what "magic juice" is added to their secret algorithm sauce. If a specific blend of "magic juice" results in higher overall evaluation scores for test searches it is added to the sauce. If a specific blend does not result in a higher evaluation score it is discarded. This is why we see all kinds of crazy results during major Google updates with sites bouncing around. Somebody is tweaking the magic juice blend to see if they can get the desired effect.
my point IS valid. I never claimed that sites were manually ranked up, im suggesting that the top 3 are closely moderated by humans evaluating which sites are more relevant for the ranking. never did i suggest that somewhere is a sweat shop of people manually deciding what page gets what SERP. only controlling what sites make the top 3. show me any listing that has a significant volume of searches done, where a MFA site or something similar is a top 2 result. wont happen.
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ok, because my blog links direct to the article + the flash on another site, and here we have a whole discussion going on... why would i try to link bait on a SEO forum?? anyway, if you chose not to believe it, thats fine. but it is hard to disprove it when no one can provide a result where SEO techniques have netted a 1-3 result for a popular keyword. i dont understand why people are so hostile on here?
stupid claim and stupid reference! If they were to put their evaluation servers online it wouldn't be eval.google.com, come on!! Plus every software and hardware company has to do some testing to evaluate its product against a benchmark. Some do exhaustive simulations and some use formal methods.
I would think that this is no different from any I.T. shop that want to evaluate the results of a new program or in this case search algorithm. It's appears to be simple quality assurance, nothing more.