LZZR

November 29, 2006

MSN delivers Hand crafted results

BLIP
According to this document found inside their own site Microsoft Live offers a kind of job which descriptiod deserves to be quoted in full:

Hand crafted results
When all else fails, and the ranking algorithms do not pass the confidence threshold, we fall back to delivering handcrafted results. Working on a team of approximately 132 other handcrafters in 26 worldwide markets, you will receive a user query, use all the available search engines to quickly scour the web for results, pick the top 10 results for this query, and send it on to the user. Successful handcrafters can typically find top 10 results for a real-time user’s query in less than 3.8 seconds. This is an opportunity to truly connect with customers, because the queries that get routed to you are precisely the ones that the engine cannot answer well. We will have adequate staffing to allow generous coffee and bathroom breaks.
If you are an expert at using at least 3 different search engines, well versed with American English/colloquial usage, and can type at > 149 words/minute as measured by the Simia-Lico method – come join us and delight users real-time!

and although it is dated by 2005 it is likely they continue the same way. It is strange that they even give an exact figure of these craftspeople - 132 which allows for a small speculation. With a managable rate of checking 100 queries a day 132 crafters will manage to handcraft 4818000 (about five millions) queries a year. I confess: in my calculation I did not allow any holidays or even weekends or days off to my handcrafters to take