In June Google held a conference on scalability in Seattle. Marrissa Mayer (unrelated to Tim) of Google commented on the 10,000 human evaluators Google has. Their function? Manually go through the search results and rate them.

Question: How do they tell if they have bad results?

Answer: By tracking uptime for various servers to make sure a bad one isn’t causing problems in their main focus. In addition, they have 10,000 human evaluators who are always manually checking the relevance of various results. Which keywords they type in wasn’t revealed.

Damn.

Say what you will about “Big Brother” or other nicknames floating around about Google. The fact is, I call, someone answers the phone who can help me, unlike my experience with other companies in search.

Google AdSense is often a hot topic and recently the “AdSense Advisor” dropped in over at Webmaster World and gave some advice … that was quite generic. So, I picked up the phone and called Google. Only one transfer brought me where I wanted to be, and exactly 18 minutes later all of my questions were answered great detail.

Excellent.