Thursday, June 15, 2006

MSN Hand-crafting Its Results

Oh my. MSN on their jobs page is looking for assistants for their “hand crafted results”:

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!

I can almost see the Microsoft meeting in which that idea was born.

Man: “Our search engine sucks.”
Woman: “What are we gonna do about it?”
Man: “We could steal results from a real search engine.”
Woman: “You mean Google and Yahoo? Isn’t that illegal?”
Man: “Not if we do it manually, no...”

[Thanks to Philipp of Ice Blog, who found it at SEO Blackhat.]

Update: Several people here and on other blogs are saying this must be a joke. I’ll update the post if there’s anything more official.

MSN Hand-crafting Its Res ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (31)

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