If you’ve run a erotic spanking site for a lot of years and paid any attention to Google and the way it displays your site in the search results, you’ll have noticed some bizarre and erratic fluctuations. Creepy sites about bad parenting practices tend to rate well above even the best erotic spanking pages, and even among the spanking porn, odd old neglected sites flourish in the search results while the most active erotic spanking sites seem to get buried.
Now via Violet Blue comes word (via this article) that Google employs a horde of outsourced human “raters” to look at pages and code them for “relevancy” with regard to various searches. That’s not news. The news is that a reporter got his hands on a copy of a 160-page Google “rater’s manual” — and it specifically used “spanking” as an example keyword to Google’s army of work-at-home raters:
Google’s human raters must also make decisions on pornographic material. Here, too, the Google Rater has to decide what the searcher’s intention is. The example of “spanking” is cited: information on parents spanking children from the University of Maine is regarded as “relevant”, a page about spanking fetish is “Slightly Relevant” and triggers the Porn flag. Porn is still deemed relevant – just not so much.
“Please do not assign a Porn flag to a non-porn page, just because the query has porn intent. If the landing page is not porn, it should not be flagged”, says the guide.
It’s no surprise that Google tries (and fails) to bury porn in its search results. But it is disheartening (if not surprising) to learn that spanking porn, specifically, takes a search engine hit because of a policy defining it as “less relevant” than pages about shitty parenting. It doesn’t matter, friends, what you want to see; what matters is that Google has decided (as a matter of corporate policy) that people typing in “spanking” are more likely looking for that shitty parenting info.
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