OK fine. So maybe there isn't actually a tiny singing man in my iPod. But Google research director Peter Norvig confirms there is an army of contractors slaving away behind that page of ten blue links.

Norvig told Technology Review that one way Google tests its search accuracy is to "randomly select specific queries and hire people to say how good our results are. We train them on how to identify spam and other bad sites, and then we record their judgments and track against that."

Sound like your kind of gig? Warning: You must be comfortable in cold weather. As in North Pole cold. Or was that some other secret workshop?

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