There has been a great deal of speculation about the reasons behind the firing of Appen by Google, the company that provides search quality evaluators, with many expressing that this may be the dawn of a new era of AI search quality classifiers. The facts, however, are clear about the meaning of these recent events.
There are two ideas being talked about in the SEO social media world about what this all means:
Google no longer needs quality qualifiers. The dismissal of search quality evaluators may mean that Google plans to implement AI search quality evaluators at scale.
Will search quality rankers go away?
Google’s search quality rankers aren’t going away. Google employs several companies to provide search quality ranking services, it is not just one company.
There are threads on reddit for example they mention Telus and RWS who apparently offer search quality rankers to Google.
So the idea that Google will no longer use search quality classifiers is unfounded, not true.
Some speculate that the reason Google fired Appen may have something to do with Appen workers being encouraged by a Google workers’ union to negotiate higher wages (according to a Forbes report).
So if Google is going to cut costs, the speculation goes, it makes sense to cut Appen’s workers, as they are close to unionized Google workers.
But this may be a coincidence.
Google announced that it was laying off workers again, including those from engineering teams, and it could be that the Appen workers losing their jobs were just part of the overall cost-cutting.
Will evaluators be replaced by AI?
Some SEOs speculated that the firing of Appen workers was a sign that Google might replace quality raters with AI.
Some search marketers opined that Google doesn’t have the ability to replace search quality raters with AI now, but that they likely will be able to do so in the near future.
Not only that, some search marketers speculated that it would be bad news for publishers if AI replaced human search quality graders because AI could scale quality ratings across the web.
And what about SEOs worrying about Google AI’s search quality raters, expressing fear of a nightmare scenario and speculating whether it’s even possible to have an AI that can rate web pages for search quality? search is that machines, including AI, have already been used for years at Google to evaluate web pages for search quality.
For example, Google has the Useful Content System, the Review System, and SpamBrain all rate websites for search quality on a scale.
So it’s not about whether Google will replace search quality raters with AI, at this point Google isn’t replacing them at all, humans are still working.
But Google already has AI and algorithms that rate websites for search quality. It’s already happening.
Will Google eventually remove search quality rankers?
Something to keep in mind is that AI training requires datasets, and the work that search quality evaluators do can provide data for machines to learn from, in addition to their stated job of rating search results of new algorithms.
What we do know at this point is that Google is not getting rid of human search quality raters, and that Google already has systems in place that rate web pages for search quality.
The sky is not falling.
It’s just another gassy week in SEO-land.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Drawlab19
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