Google Cuts Thousands of Workers Improving Search After Search Results Scientifically Shown to Suck::“These workers provide critical support that keeps Google’s flagship Search results and Bard AI safe and functional for the company’s billions of users,” the union representing the contractors said.
Search doesn’t suck because people aren’t working to make it better.
Search was working great for years. Search sucks because they are fucking it with SEO and ads, and they like it that way because they make more money.
So whoever they are firing for whatever reason has nothing to do with their shitty search.
If they wanted to make search better they’d cut the ad department not the search improvement department. That’s not where the money-extracting is though.
Google is fucking it with SEO? How does that work?
They allow (and encourage) people to game the algorithm.
They do?
“Since a study said you guys are sucking at your job, we are just going to cancel the lot of you”
Probably just poor timing, still bad optics.
Managers do all the real work, thus deserve all the compensation
- managers everywhere, every day
I may not know how to write programs, but I could still do a better job than people with decades of experience in doing exactly that
- these particular managers
They’ve laid off programmers, but the people in this particular story aren’t programmers.
The workers in question are employed by RaterLabs, an Appen subsidiary specializing in search engine evaluation. They are responsible for training Google’s search algorithm by testing search queries and rating the accuracy and relevance of the results.
Oh, yeah probably you’re right.
Enshitification is no accident.
The headline for parents is that Google is firing a bunch of people who keep gore and porn out of Google safe search.
I’ll be right back, I need to grab some popcorn for this.
After I double check that my own kid’s browsers all default to DuckDuckGo…
Tbh most of nsfw content moderation has been automated for several years now and ML image recognition has come a long way. I’m a bit surprised they’re only firing 10% of raters.
I’m surprised they’re paying them at all. They could offer an extra couple of gigs of storage and people would do it for free.
Glad to see Google sticking its slogan of “Do Much Evil”.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
I’m surprised Google was still using raters. I used to be one through a third party over a decade ago. The pay was okay but it was a 1099 so taxes were a mess. Ended up getting “fired” for reasons I didn’t understand, as there wasn’t much transparency in the process.
I don’t understand what the title is trying to say. Google fires workers which lead to improved search results that have been previously bad??
Employees that work on improving search results… Have been fired / laid off… After report comes out about how bad search results are.
