Imagine you wanted to search something on Google and no matter how good your search term is, you get wrong results.

So, what does this tell us? No matter how good the Google algorithm is, it requires constant human interference to make it great. This is where a Search Engine Evaluator comes in.

Search Engine Evaluation is a relatively easy online working option with many companies coming into this space.

Earlier, few organizations were advertising jobs for this role, but now you have many to apply, which makes it easier for you to get a role which has such flexibility. What is the job of a search engine evaluator and how can you get started? Read on to find answers to this and many more questions.

• What is Search Engine Evaluation
• How to Become a Search Engine Evaluator
• Where to Find Web Search Evaluator Jobs
• How Much Does a Search Engine Evaluator Earn
• 10 Criteria to Evaluate Search Engines
• How does Google measure the quality of search results?
• Who Are The Main Competitors of Google
• All you need to know about Google Custom Search Engine

What is Search Engine Evaluation

We all go to search engines, that is, Google or Bing or Yahoo every day to search anything. Every search engine has a set algorithm according to which it shows the results. But, even though the algorithm is perfect, the results sometimes don’t match the queries (your search term).

A search engine evaluator takes your search term and matches it with the results of the search engine and decides the compatibility of the results. The search engine evaluation is performed using preset guidelines.

If you are good with your web navigation, know your way around websites, are a quick learner and have good internet connection, then you fit the role.

One thing you will have to keep in mind is, you need to be up to date with your regional culture, news and everything going around.

Read Also: How Does Google Get Profit by Search Engine

The reason for this is, the nature of work is mostly region related. For example, if you are located in Germany, then the queries you get would be completely according to that country.

If you can understand a set of guidelines and are adaptable, then you can take a shot at this.

How to Become a Search Engine Evaluator

You can become a search engine evaluator in three simple ways:

1. Apply to one of the companies hiring Google raters (Google doesn’t hire for the position directly)
2. Pass the qualification test
3. Complete paperwork and begin working.

It’s that simple!

Initial requirements to be a search engine evaluator

• High School Diploma or GED Qualification for US candidates. In case you are from another country, a college degree or equivalent is preferred. In my opinion, this is not really required. Just apply anyways.
• For cultural awareness purposes, you should be living in your country for the last 5 consecutive years.
• Active user of Gmail and other social media like Twitter and Facebook.
• Familiarity with current and historical business, media, sport, news, social media and cultural affairs of your country.
• Experience in use of web browsers to navigate and interact with a variety of content online.
• Access to and being comfortable using Google Home or Amazon Echo devices is an additional bonus. In my opinion, you don’t really need access to or got to be able to use those devices. I don’t have one myself.
• You should have a smartphone – iPhone or Android, any will work. No tablets, though!
• You should have a PC, Mac or Chromebook.

Where to Find Web Search Evaluator Jobs

Search evaluation is typically a work-at-home position that may go by many names — search evaluator, internet assessor, ads quality rater, or internet judge.

Google calls the jobs “ads quality rater.” This is one of only a few home-based Google job opportunities. Other companies also hire for search evaluation positions, and many of them also work for Google.

Search engine evaluators give feedback to ensure that internet search results are comprehensive, accurate, timely and that they are spam-free and relevant to the searcher’s intent. In essence, they are the human check on the complicated algorithms that search engines run.

To do this, the search engine evaluator must be familiar with the language and the culture of the local search engine user. These positions are a form of localization, so typically they are bilingual positions, but there are some openings for English-only search evaluators.

A college degree is often required or at least desired. Typically the jobs are part-time, which may be on an independent contractor basis or as a temporary employee.

Appen

The freelance search evaluators at Appen must be native speakers of the language in which they are working, knowledgeable about the internet, and familiar with a wide variety of online news sources. Independent contractors in these positions work four to five hours per weekday.

Many freelance positions require fluency in one of the more than 120 languages and dialects Appen offers its clients. Applicants review qualification material and take a series of exams over a one to three week period.

Google

Google calls its search evaluators “ads quality raters.” This is one of the only work-at-home positions the internet giant offers, and it doesn’t hire for it directly — the hiring is done through outside employment agencies.

The position requires extensive knowledge of local culture and fluency in the local language. Applicants need excellent communication skills, web analytic capabilities, and a college degree or the equivalent in experience.

Leapforce

Leapforce specializes in hiring work-at-home search engine evaluators, search quality judges and map quality analysts, many of whom perform work for Google. The company hires both English-only and bilingual workers. The company’s search engine evaluators conduct research, evaluate results and provide feedback to the company.

Applicants must have excellent web research skills and analytical abilities, a university degree or equivalent experience, and have a broad range of interests with specific areas of expertise a plus.

Candidates must study supplied study materials and pass a three-part qualification exam.

Lionbridge

Lionbridge is a global localization company that has what it terms internet assessor jobs as well as several other similar jobs in its crowdsourcing division. The company uses thousands of work-at-home independent contractors for specific work. These positions include:

• Internet assessors who evaluate results of a web search
• Social media search consultants who express opinions on the quality of content
• Internet judges, which are similar to internet assessors
• Online maps specialist who evaluate and improve online mapping software

Openings are listed on the company website, and applicants take an online assessment to demonstrate their ability to perform the required services.

ZeroChaos

ZeroChaos recruits people who have lived in-country and are fluent in a language but does not hire foreign native speakers to evaluate web search results. Its evaluators need to have proficiency English skills to interface with English-based software. It only employs people in the United States.

An ad quality rater reports and tracks visual quality and content accuracy of Google advertisement. They provide feedback and analysis to Google. College-level fluency in English is required. The company hires work-from-home ad quality raters as temporary employees.

How Much Does a Search Engine Evaluator Earn

Many of these companies have several projects going at any given time. Each project typically has its own pay rate. While these companies usually require a non-disclosure agreement from contractors, many people have said the pay is more than minimum wage and many speculate it’s in the range of $12 to $15 per hour.

As for the hours available, it can vary greatly. Some people may only be assigned to a project allowing for one hour of work per day while others may be holding a workload of 30 hours per week or more. You can set your availability within your profile or at the time of hiring. Making yourself more available may get you assigned to more projects.

10 Criteria to Evaluate Search Engines

In most organizations, site search effectiveness, or lack thereof, impacts business productivity and the overall bottom line. As the amount of unstructured content continues to grow, companies who are able to make the best use of their intellectual capital will gain a competitive advantage.

According to International Data Group (IDG), unstructured data is growing 62% per year. And Gartner estimates data volume will grow 800% over the next five years with 80% of it residing as unstructured data.

These statistics just reemphasize how important it is to get a handle on unstructured data now and to ensure you have a search engine that supports your strategy to do so. 

Whether you are in the process of implementing your first search engine, migrating to a new search engine, or looking to make improvements to your current one, there are a few critical criteria to evaluate in order to understand what search engine best fits your business objectives.

The importance of certain features, functionalities, and performance metrics will vary whether you’re looking to improve your internal or external search, depending on your industry, and on what you want users to get out of your site search. 

1. Core Technology – What’s the base programming technology? Is it open source or commercial? What are the total licensing costs? What are the skill sets needed? It’s best to understand the answers to these questions up front.  
2. Scalability – Modern search engines, open source or commercial, often have the ability to scale up to millions and billions of documents. However, scalability isn’t usually out-of-the-box – the more documents you need to store and index, the more sophisticated the configuration needs to be in order to handle high data volumes. Make sure you know if it’s easy or more complex to scale your search engine of choice.  
3. Connectors – Your search engine should provide the flexibility needed to achieve an optimum performance configuration for your connectors. This way you can maximize your data aggregation, discovery, and analytics potential. It’s important to know what connector types and specific connectors you will need as you’re evaluating your options. 
4. Content Processing – Content processing is a critical function of a search engine. This process ensures that data from disparate sources plays well together for completeness and relevancy during the search process. Understand the various components of content processing as you evaluate search engines: records merging, taxonomy, entity and data extraction, and data normalization. 
5. Indexing – Crawls for search engines are essential to indexing content. Scheduling a crawl, either a full or an incremental crawl, is not taken lightly by IT professionals. Some aspects of an indexing task that you should be aware of and evaluate include: speed of indexing, indexing latency, and dynamic fields. 
6. Query Functionality – The search engine should be able to support and optimize query-based search functions, depending on the types of data, business problems, or customer-facing applications you have. There are some expected and essential functions that you should make sure your search engine has. 
7. Search Relevancy – Relevancy ranking is the process of sorting the document results so that those documents which are most likely to be relevant to your query are shown at the top. Relevancy depends on consistently testing and improving algorithms. The better your understanding of the user intent, the higher search relevancy you can reach with your search engine.
8. Security –Where multiple repositories are involved, implementing security can be complex, as the various groups and roles from each repository must be unified into a single schema for filtering out unauthorized results. In many organizations, the most sensitive documents are kept in repositories with particularly complex security regimes. 
9. User Interface – The user interface (UI) configuration is just as critical as the back-end configuration. You need to have a user-centric, intuitive interface with which users are familiar (think Google search or Amazon site search) and able to conduct search and analysis productively.
10. Administration, Monitoring, and Maintenance – Requirements for the administrative dashboard and alerting configurations differ between organizations, but are must-haves for most. In addition, updates to new or enhanced versions of search engines could be difficult and error-prone. Many complex search and big data applications also require specialized skill sets to manage, maintain, and improve. Make sure you plan and arrange for support and management.

Most importantly, make sure your in-house IT staff has the bandwidth and skill sets needed to conduct a thorough assessment of the elements and functionalities above. Doing this will ensure your search engine performs as intended.

How does Google measure the quality of search results?

Google’s algorithms for search engine optimization (SEO) have plenty of nuts and bolts, and the complexity can make it difficult to land on practical steps for optimizing your website.

First, it’s crucial to understand how the quality process works and answer the question, “How does Google measure success?”

You might already know about Google’s intense network of algorithms. Google’s algorithms have signals that detect different elements on pages, and their characteristics earn them corresponding spots.

What the bulk of people don’t know is that Google has flesh-and-blood testers that rate the quality of pages, and this helps their algorithms continually improve. There are a handful of highly valuable factors for search relevance testing, but the outcome varies depending on the tester.

If they’re at the point that human testers give feedback on search results, these are the five general steps for how Google measures the quality of search results:

1. Testers input sample search queries.
2. They examine search results for different quality factors.
3. The testers rate the aspects of quality.
4. They turn in their ratings on the evaluation platform.
5. Google reviews their impressions and comments to gauge the usefulness of the search engine.

Although Google’s algorithms and testing methods for SEO are cloaked in mystery, there are multiple ways to tweak the quality of a page so it can climb the ranks.

1. Honest SEO tactics

One of the main pieces of advice Google gives on creating rich, high-ranking content is to shy away from sneaky SEO practices.

In the past, people designed their websites to finagle through Google’s standards rather than help users. As Google has picked up on these dodgy habits, they’ve become better at spotting shortcuts and hacks.

Google even recommends that websites stay upfront about their SEO methods. Accordingly, their guidelines focus on “don’ts” rather than “do’s,” because they’re adamant about avoiding shady approaches.

For example, the search engine isn’t going to bump your page to a top-ranking spot if you have camouflaged text packed with keywords lurking around. They also filter out reproduced content, which includes scraped or plagiarized information.

Overall, Google sifts through results until they find unique, helpful pages. They want to feature sites that satisfy users and put into practice authentic techniques.

2. Accessible layout

If your page is filled to the brim with quality, visitors can easily navigate through the information. Accessibility includes how fast pages load, how clear the central content is, and how uniform the informational structure is.

Visitors consider your page a worthwhile resource if they can find the main content quickly. If a result is littered with irrelevant information and blurbs before they reach the meat of the page, they don’t stick around for long. Make sure the prominent parts of your page match up with the purpose of their search.

This means a clear format is ideal, and the “signposts” around the website — like overhead menus, footer directories, and links to related articles — should lead them to other services or information that interest them. Pages that focus on a user-friendly setup tend to show up in the higher quality bracket.

3. Engaging multimedia

At a glance, you can notice a solid chunk of text and realize the volume of reading you’re about to tackle. You might have to prepare yourself before you challenge your attention span to that task.

In the same way, pure pages of words aren’t as inviting without multimedia.

How Google measures the quality of search results includes visual content. Google notices which pages have images and videos to complement their information, and they reward the results that enhance their page with a variety of media.

Think of Buzzfeed and the string of GIFs and pictures that they infuse into their pages. There’s a reason people flock to picture-supplemented websites, and Google knows it.

Expanding your options is fruitful for reaching visitors, but it also increases the likelihood of rising on Google and relating to other kinds of queries that might want a video related to the topic.

Infographics, videos, and engaging visuals can help your page stand out as a top performer in search results.

4. Dwell time on quality pages

After someone plugs their query into Google and clicks on your page, Google tracks how much time they continue to explore your page. The span of time they remain on your website — dwell time — shows how effective your page is for their purposes.

Chances are that the longer people spend their time on your website, the more likely it is that your page answered a visitor’s question or gripped their attention.

This is also true for subpar results. When a visitor abandons your page after a few seconds and returns to Google, your page fell short of their expectations — and this sends negative signals to search engines.

5. In-depth content

Page length and word count are key players in quality because a thorough page tends to perform better on Google. In general, short, surface-level pages aren’t as insightful and lack substance.

The misconception is that people’s attention spans can’t handle a 2000-page article. Yet these lengthier pages offer more details, and Google’s users appreciate robust pages in their day-to-day searches.

The pages that deliver a full-course meal for visitors rather than samplings lead Google’s rankings, and this pairs with dwell time because visitors linger all the way down the page before darting off to other corners of the Internet.

6. Number and quality of backlinks

The internal and external links on your page influence your status on Google because they can cause your credibility to fluctuate. Trustworthiness is a huge concern for Google, and links are on the front lines for judging the integrity of a page.

When ranking pages, Google looks at the number and quality of backlinks to your site. The quality of sites that you reference or rely on can shift your website’s reliability and quality.

When other authorities that interact with your topic point back to your page, this is also valued by Google.

For instance, the Pew Research Center’s link to NPR in an article about social media usage reinforces NPR’s online reputation about the topic in Google’s eyes.

7. Polished content

You may not be a stickler for grammar and spelling, but they are connected to Google’s standards for quality. Google steers clear of sloppy content, so you need to aim for the opposite of that — carefully curated pages.

Spelling and grammar are indirect indications of a result’s strength, and there are other ways to tell if content is polished. Citations are also a sign that you’ve thought through the material you’re publishing.

Ultimately, Google wants to promote pages that have been checked and refined over hastily constructed ones.

Who Are The Main Competitors of Google

The brand that owns the smartest search engine in the world is also known for its Android Mobile operating system which is used across a very large number of cellphones and mobile devices. Google’s search engine holds the largest market share followed by Microsoft’s Bing.  

Apart from that, Google is also a competitor of Microsoft and Amazon in cloud-based services. Google’s hosted messaging and a large range of productivity suite products compete with several products by Apple and Microsoft.

The cloud industry especially is seeing very heavy competition because of the growing opportunities in this segment and because of its heavy profitability. Now, Google has entered the smartphone market with its Pixel.

While its share in the smartphone industry is very small, still, it can grow into a significant player over time if it continues to invest in this area. In online search and digital advertising, it will continue to remain the biggest player. Another major player is Facebook whose share in digital advertising has continued to grow with its growing customer base.

Google’s main competitors are the big four – Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. However, apart from these main rivals, small and big rivalries in several areas can also be identified from clouds to streaming services and social media. Netflix and Hulu are leading competitors of Google’s YouTube.

Google Important Stats 2019:

• Revenue from Advertising: $134,811 Million.
• Total Revenue: $160,743 Million.
• Number of Employees – 118,899.

Apple

Apple is one of the toughest competitors that has made a return to the top position in the tech industry with a  bang. Its iOs is the biggest competitor of Google’s Android OS.

The maker of Mac and iPhone has got its market value at around 1.4 Trillion USD. Despite the sweeping changes across the computing industry, the brand has continued to grow based on its iPhone sales.  

Even after the passing away of Steve Jobs, Apple is ruling the tech industry and investing in new technologies. It turns out the brand is the strongest rival of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Microsoft

The maker of the windows operating system is also a major competitor of Google’s business empire. The two compete in several areas including cloud technology and search advertising. While Google has the lion’s share in the online advertising business, Microsoft also has a significant presence in this field.

Moreover, it continues to invest in areas like AI and IoT to remain ahead in the race of technology. Microsoft’s Bing search engine competes with Google. While Google has the largest market share in this area, Bing is just second to it.

Amazon

Amazon has also grown to be a tough competitor for Google. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are taking the lead in the cloud business industry.

Google’s cloud business is growing but at a slower rate than its leading competitors. Amazon’s revenue has also grown very fast in recent years. In fact, it is the toughest competitor before Google in the cloud industry.

Facebook

Facebook, the leading social media platform is also one of the biggest competitors of Google. Most of the competition is in the area of advertising.

Facebook’s share in mobile advertising has grown faster in recent years. The two brands together grab the lion’s share in online advertising. Facebook’s share has continued to grow fast and it is giving Google a tough competition in this area with the number of active users past 2 Billion, Facebook is actively growing to become a favorite of marketers.

Moreover, Google’s YouTube is also a close competitor of Facebook. Several other apps by both companies also compete with each other.

However, this is not the entire story because there are several other influential players in the cloud industry too. The demand for cloud technology has grown very fast in recent years.

Several major cloud players have merged whose revenues have grown fast owing to the fast growth of the cloud industry. Some of the biggest names that compete with Google’s cloud services include IBM, Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle.

Apart from these, since Google owns Youtube a social media brand, it is also in competition with other social media channels like Twitter, Instagram etc. as well as other streaming video sites like Netflix and Hulu. 

Read Also: How Does a Search Engine Site Earn Money

So, the number of competitors of Google has continued to grow and it is mainly because of the growing number of players in the cloud industry. The search engines that compete with Google include Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex among several others.

All you need to know about Google Custom Search Engine

In 2018, Google terminated two out of three search products: Google Site Search and Google Search Appliance, and now put all the efforts into an old, well-known product, Google Custom Search Engine (or CSE).

Google CSE has changed a lot since the closure of its two corresponding products. Google Custom Search used to be a free site search supported by Google ads. That’s right, if you install CSE you will be showing ads of other businesses (and even your competitors) on your own website.

As of today, Google CSE offers different plans for different business needs as well as lots of customization tools. Yet its design limitations, ads, lack of speed made many of former Google search products’ customers look for a better solution.

Google Custom Search Pricing

Here’s Google Custom Search Engine pricing taken from its official website.

You can see that the free Standard Search Element still comes with ads. Google CSE make it obligatory for non-profit companies to use Google branding on their website.

Custom Search powered by JSON API, which is no longer free but costs $5 per 1000 queries, is not sustainable for large websites because of its limitations of 10,000 queries per day or 10 domains connected to the search engine (depending on if you choose JSON API or Restricted JSON API).

Setup and Implementation

Google Custom Search Engine support simple installation with inserting Javascript code to the website. Google Custom Search customization is limited to a few settings. If you have a more complex solution in mind, API is available for CSE.

Support

If in trouble, Google does not provide any support for search products, whether you use paid search or a free one. If you have any technical issues or questions, Google directs customers to its Community Forum, where Google enthusiasts and employees publicly discuss the subject of support.