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Matt Cutts says there is more to Google than the churning of computers. He talked about the role of people in the search process.

Cutts Thinks Google Is Human

"Soylent Green is people!" -- if you haven't seen Soylent Green by now, consider the ending spoiled.

Google's approach to including humans in the search process offers a much friendlier approach than Harry Harrison did to the problem of overpopulation. Matt felt motivated to commenting on a New York Times piece that discussed how the human touch could have an impact on the search company.

"It would be a mistake to think 'Google is nothing but cold algorithms and computers; there’s no room for humans at all'," said Matt on his blog.

He cited several pieces of Google technology that enable people to influence its functions, whether directly or indirectly. Google News served as one example: "The decisions of human editors at thousands of news sites help Google estimate whether a particular story is significant," Matt said.

The question of human influence comes about as new search engines featuring human editing have come into vogue. The Times cited Mahalo as one example, and we have mentioned a couple of the other many examples of this.

More human participation in Google's editing process would serve best if it could cut down on some of the higher-ranked results for less than high-quality pages. With so many billions of potential queries made each month, the mechanistic approach has to be part of any human editing that takes place.