Human hand in Google Rank
By Bala Shah

Google dominates the search market, and because of its substantial power, it is important that Governments and civil rights bodies keep an eye on it.  Recently, it came to light that Google Street View cars had captured passwords and personal data of many people.  Google apologized for this mistake.

For years, Google insisted that an unbiased and neutral computer program ranked every website it indexed.  In theory, as all the work was done by a computer system there was very less chance that human biases and lobbying would result in a website getting undeserved preference over another.

Now, for the first time,  tech guru Scott Cleland (via FT.com) has published details of how Google uses Human Raters to ensure that some companies do not play the system by using the brand recognition of one of its successful  products to promote other less successful products on the search engine.

Scott Cleland has been profiled in Fortune and WSJ and has been invited by eight different Congress sub committees to give expert testimony on different topics. Scott has just blogged

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Today, Google publicly admitted for the first time that its purported "neutral" and "unbiased" search algorithm is not completely-automated or computer-algorithmic like Google has long and consistently represented to the public.

Google’s Mr. Singhal calls this the problem of “brand recognition”: where companies whose standing is based on their success in one area use this to “venture out into another class of information which they may not be as rich at”. Google uses human raters to assess the quality of individual sites in order to counter this effect, he adds.
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Now that this information is in the public domain, expect current and future lawsuits against Google to ask for the exact role of these Human Raters in deciding who and why gets a higher or lower rank in a Google searches.