The full version of Google’s Search Quality Rating Guidelines has been just released. The document, which is in the form of a 160-page PDF file, is meant to help to Google Search Quality Raters understand how to rate the search results they are testing.
The October version of the document was leaked earlier this week, but this wasn’t the first time something like this happened. The same thing happened back in 2008, 2001, 2012, along with other times. It almost seems that in order to combat their document getting leaked, they decided to release it, when it was previously available to these Search Quality Raters.
Google’s Mimi Underwood said that,
“Ratings from evaluators do not determine individual site rankings, but are used help us understand our experiments.” She added, “The evaluators base their ratings on guidelines we give them; the guidelines reflect what Google thinks search users want.”
It seems that Underwood might be implying that Google will constantly keep the documented updated, since they are constantly refreshing it. After all, search is always changing, along with how people are using it.
You can download the full version, courtesy of Google, over here.