For many years, Google on its explanation of “Our Search Results page,  new statement” claimed that “A site’s ranking in Google’s search results relies heavily on computer algorithms using thousands of factors to calculate a page’s relevance to a given query.” Google had finally acknowledged that its search results were no longer solely and automatically determined by the company’s vaunted algorithms. Now they simply “relied heavily” on them. Why the sudden change?

“[…]we have 10,000 folks around the world who are trained to evaluate the quality of results. And then we have a work flow system that feeds them different kinds of evaluation tasks. Things like “tell us how good you think this result is for this query.” And then out of the data, we produce a set of aggregate metrics that we look at and that we can track over time, said John Paczkowski.[…]”

Full Article: Digital Daily