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Google Cuts Thousands of Workers Improving Search After Search Results Scientifically Shown to Suck

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.

brb ,

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??

grayman ,

Employees that work on improving search results..... Have been fired / laid off..... After report comes out about how bad search results are.

billwashere ,

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

son_named_bort ,

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.

MajorHavoc ,

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...

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

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.

linearchaos ,
@linearchaos@lemmy.world avatar

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.

eager_eagle ,
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world avatar

Reasons probably include liability. It can be a pretty fucked up job seeing some of this content for hours a day.

bassomitron ,

I think it was RadioLab who did an episode on the content moderators for Facebook. To make matters worse, much of that work is outsourced to developing countries who get paid pennies and have no mental health resources available for ingesting so much traumatic content for 10+ hours a shift every day. It's been a few years since I listened to the episode, but I think the turnover was extremely high due to the understandable burnout. The episode also touched on law enforcement workers that have to review that content for legal cases and the mental toll it takes on them.

Hopefully, one day, people won't be needed for that kind of work as automation improves to the point that it has a 100% success rate in detection and removing. And of course, hopefully one day there are no longer humans creating/producing such disgusting content in the first place.

lolcatnip ,

We'll always need human review of photos like that unless we decide it's ok to convict people for crimes based solely on an AI's judgement. And we'll still need people to deal with horrific shit in real life.

jaybone ,

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.

Rentlar ,

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.

ripcord ,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

Google is fucking it with SEO? How does that work?

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

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

lolcatnip ,

They've laid off programmers, but the people in this particular story aren't programmers.

OpenStars ,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

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.

clover ,

Enshitification is no accident.

SinningStromgald ,

Glad to see Google sticking its slogan of "Do Much Evil".

snekerpimp ,

“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.

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