Appen, an Australian data services company that Google contracts with for a large number of its third-party search quality evaluators, notified Google that its contract was ending on March 19, 2024. Appen said it had no prior notice and the cancellation would result in a loss of $82.8 million in revenue with a gross margin of 26% for the company.
What search quality evaluators do. Google Quality Raters evaluate the quality of Google search results. They do not directly influence search results, and quality raters cannot downgrade or upgrade a specific site in Google Search.
Guidelines for Search Quality Evaluators “They are used by ours search classifiers to help evaluate the performance of our different search ranking systems, and their ratings do not directly influence rankings,” according to Google. “The guidelines share important considerations about what content is useful to people when using Google Search. Our how to page create useful and people-centric content summarizes these concepts to help creators self-assess their own content for success on Google Search,” the company added.
That means. Appen is one of the few sources that Google uses to hire quality reviewers. It appears, based on the nearly $83 million in revenue, that Google hired Appen for a couple of thousand reviewers. Google has written has about 16,000 search quality raters, so Appen employees represent a significant portion of the total quality raters employed.
Will Google cancel its contracts with its other partners that provide search quality rankers? We are not sure. Will Google replace these quality raters with other human quality raters from these other partners? We are not sure. Will Google eventually replace all quality raters with AI? This is what many speculate. We, again, don’t know.
Dawn Anderson, one of our brightest contributors here, speculated that these changes would happen months ago. And now with many of the Google Ads team fired and replaced by AI. Google following a similar playbook for evaluating quality makes sense.
Why we care Human search quality raters have been part of Google’s process to improve search quality for more than a dozen years. Is this a big pivot from using humans for this process to using AI for this process? It’s hard to know.
Will this result in lower search quality in the future? Again, it’s hard to tell, but time will tell.
Hats off to Cyrus Shepard for seeing this:
Big change for Google Quality Raters
Google cancels contract with Appen/RaterLabs (the company that hires me as a quality rater)
You have no idea what this means for the Quality Rater program pic.twitter.com/rzScBe4Dvn
— Cyrus SEO (@CyrusShepard) January 22, 2024
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