UPDATED: Google may be officially launching Rater Hub

Back in 2005, Henk van Ess wrote about the Google Rater Hub, a somewhat secretive program at the time that had people review and rate the quality of Google’s search results.

Well, now it looks like the Rater Hub program will soon have a more public home on the web with the registration of the domain raterhub.com earlier this week by Google.  

Typing the web address today, takes you to a Google 404 page that says, “The requested URL / was not found on this server. That’s all we know.” 

404 pages on Google’s network can be a good sign that something is happening out at Google.

Paying people to review and rate search results at Google is nothing new and the very topic was recently in the news.

In January, Matt McGee published a detailed interview online with a Google Search Quality Rater, after a contractor contacted Search Engine Land wanting to explain and clarify some of the things that had been written and said about the program.

While Google hires contractors to do the job, it’s possible it may be doing more.

The search engine giant registered the domain name raterhub.com (Whois) through MarkMonitor on February 13, 2012, which surprisingly had never been registered before. 

In the past few days, the name transferred from MarkMonitor’s name server to Google.

Given the purchase of the domain, name server changes and the recent news, we could expect to see something soon on RaterHub.com.

[Update 1 on February 22, 2012: In the past 24 hours, a sign in page has gone online using Google Accounts, as shown in the snapshot below.  The message reads, “Google is not affiliated with the contents of Ewok2 Rater Hub or its owners.”  It appears Rater Hub is a third party service, not operated by Google.] 

Discussion: Search Engine Land