We’ve seen Google’s search quality raters referenced numerous times, but now Google has made available the entire set of guidelines in a single giant PDF in your perusal. The document is named “Search Quality Rating Guidelines,” and interestingly, it’s labeled version 1.0, and is dated November 2012. It was released as element of Google’s new “How Search Works” site.

“Google depends upon raters, working in countries and languages everywhere, to assist us measure the standard of our search results, ranking, and search experience,” Google explains. “These raters perform lots of other forms of “rating tasks” designed to provide us information regarding the standard of alternative types of ends up in response to other forms of queries. The knowledge they generate is rolled up statistically to provide us in the Google search team a view of the standard of our search results and search experience through the years, in addition to a capability to measure the effect of proposed changes to Google’s search algorithms. Raters’ judgments don’t directly impact Google’s search result rankings. While a rater can give a specific URL a score, that score doesn’t directly increase or decrease a given website’s ranking. Instead these scores are utilized in aggregate to guage search quality and make decisions about changes.”

In the preface of the document, Google notes that the document itself isn’t the entire version that raters actually use each day, but rather a “Cliffs Note” version.

“The raters’ version includes instruction on using the rating interface, additional rating examples, etc.,” Google explains. “These guidelines are used as rating specifications for search raters, and this document mainly makes a speciality of a core kind of rating task called ‘URL rating.’ In a URL rating task, a rater is shown a search query from their locale (country + language) and a URL that may be returned by a search engine for that question. The raters ‘rate’ the standard of that result for that question, on a scale described inside the document. Sounds simple, right As you’ll see, there are lots of cases to think through, and this document is used to lead raters on a number of those cases and the way to have a look at them.”

In a Webmaster Help video released this past October, Matt Cutts also discussed the standard raters’ “impact” on algorithms.

Here’s another one they put out in May talking about how Google uses the human raters: