Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The “Official Google Blog” put up a post yesterday titled “Search evaluation at Google” that gives some really interesting insight into how Google goes about improving search result quality and user-experience. Below are some points I found to be interesting, but I highly recommend reading the entire post.

Google’s evaluation methods:

• “Human evaluators. Google makes use of evaluators in many countries and languages. These evaluators are carefully trained and are asked to evaluate the quality of search results in several different ways. We sometimes show evaluators whole result sets by themselves or “side by side” with alternatives; in other cases, we show evaluators a single result at a time for a query and ask them to rate its quality along various dimensions.”
  
• “Live traffic experiments. We also make use of experiments, in which small fractions of queries are shown results from alternative search approaches. Ben Gomes talked about how we make use of these experiments for testing search UI elements in his previous post. With these experiments, we are able to see real users’ reactions (clicks, etc.) to alternative results.”

Anyone remotely involved in SEO or digital marketing should always take advantage of any information / insight Google opens to the public.

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