Goodbye robots, hello people
Two stories about Google getting personal in trying to fix its search results which have recently not been that satisfactory (at least for me).
One reports a whole gaggle of Google employees around the world manually checking and prioritizing search results (can anyone say, Yahoo!). SearchEngineWatch (thanks to MarketingVOX) reports:
Google Secret Lab, Prelude from Henk van Ess's new Search Bistro blog looks at how Google uses human reviewers to improve search quality. Ess has a screenshot and a Flash movie of how the system works, for Google's temporarily hired Q&A checkers. Very nice details so far that I've never seen posted anywhere before. However, this type of system isn't new.
Thanks to this NetImperatives story pointed out by MarketingVOX: Another free service currently in beta, Google Sitemaps, allows webmasters to submit and prioritize all the pages of a website they want crawled:
Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.