With the full text of Google’s general guidelines leaked on remote quality raters (April 2007 version — PDF) , one can really envision the immense problems that Google is having with its algorithm. A company that proclaimed itself as being able to algorithmically determine what should rank well across the web has been slowly backtracking towards either a manual approach or a double-checking approach towards Google’s search results.

News of the document is spreading like wildfire with ideas on how to use it to every SEO advantage. You can even begin to see further manual reviews happening as well affecting a multitude of websites.

Nonetheless, what the main players are not noting is how blatantly this points out the failure of Google’s algorithm and the future of spam results showing up more prominently.

Let’s assume for the moment that Google is not using these quality raters to just double-check its algorithm:

As Google is having to rely more and more on human edits to find and adjust sites that should not rank as high (or as low) as various websites should. The more Google has to rely on people to go through its own search results, the more labor-intensive fact-checking becomes as the web continues to expand, both in terms of the number of websites created (whether via SEO or not) and in terms of the number of people online (English language or not).

The more labor-intensive it is, the more likely that search results for keywords that are not high priority consist of spam, Google violations, paid links, and additional blackhat techniques, leading to lower quality results for the majority of the Internet. This is, of course, assuming that the number of websites appearing is expanding faster than the number of people Google needs to hire to monitor its results (a safe bet in my opinion).

Therefore, the use of quality raters in my opinion is either a last ditch effort to stave off the on-coming spam or is the next step in Google’s ever-changing algorithm to somehow merge quality raters and how humans determine results within its algorithm.

This then leads to the next concept that Google is using them to help improve its algorithm.

More likely I see Google as trying to algorithmically determine how to improve search results by finding patterns in the way people decide what sites should rank well. Essentially Google is trying to determine how the quality raters behavior could be adopted into the algorithm, not in an artificial intelligence kind of way, but as whether the behavior could be mimicked algorithmically.

So, does this mean it’s a total failure for Google? Not quite as it is possible for Google to find some fascinating patterns that could improve its algorithm, however, at a certain point Google can only engineer so much without going into artificial intelligence to help combat an ever-increasing SEO competitiveness to rank well in Google’s SERPs.