Bane Curation project

The Bane Curation project by Appen isn’t a new project, but one that has been around a couple of years already. This is a search engine rater project, which is the first type of work at home project this company and other companies like Lionbridge started out with.

The Bane Curation project’s main goal is to evaluate the quality of landing pages in which a rater will take into consideration multiple factors before assigning a rating for the page. It is helpful if you always have a proactive attitude towards the guide, and understand how to assign a rating based on the query of the user.

The biggest thing in being successful in this project is making sure you understand the guidelines.

Some important things to remember if you apply for this project.

If you want to pass the qualification, you’ll need to study the guidelines like they are your ‘Holy Grail’, you must complete all required tasks, and you must meet all the testing deadlines where you will need to pass a quiz that demonstrates you know what you are doing.

It is important to know that we can help you pass these tests and quizzes and show you the right way to do things. At any time you want some personal help, just drop me an email or comment on this post and we’ll get you prepared. Failure to meet Appen’s deadlines will disqualify you for this project and you may not ever get another chance to apply.

Rating process

As a rater for this project, you will follow a two-step process.

Step One: Assess the Purpose and Reputation of a landing page or website.

You will be given a set of webpages, or landing pages, which is the first place you see when clicking on a website ad or link. Using the knowledge that you already have, and the research steps that are given in the guidelines, you will evaluate these pages to fully understand their purpose and reputation.

By understanding the purpose of a website, you’ll know what criteria are important when evaluating that page. Once you understand the purpose, you will assign a rating from the highest quality Page Quality rating to the lowest Page Quality rating. It is up to you to determine what rating a website will get.

Every page on the internet is created with some kind of intent whether they are created to be helpful for users, or if some pages were solely designed to make money and even some pages that are created to cause harm.

You should know by now that websites should be created to help users. If you run into pages that have ads all over them, or it’s perfectly clear that the pages only intent is to make money, then pages like this should get the lowest quality rating.

It is important to keep in mind that there will be the highest and lowest quality pages of all different types and purposes.

It is important to remember that the type of page does not determine its rating.

Some types of pages could impact the future happiness, health, or even the financial stability of users. For those who are familiar with this type of work and these kinds of projects, Google terms these kinds of websites ‘Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages. It is important that these pages aren’t intended to be harmful or trick users when it comes to their money or their well-being. That is why there are VERY HIGH Page Quality Standards for YMYL pages. These pages are outlined in the guidelines and include, shopping, entertainment, social, news, finance, medical/health websites, and many others.

Understanding the main content, supplementary content, and the advertisement on the page including ads is important.

The main content is the reason the website exists in the first place and it should be easy for you to quickly understand it matches the query of the user and gives the user what they are looking for right there on the main page without having to search or look too hard for the information.

It is important to understand that just because a website has a lot of ads, doesn’t mean that the page should get a lower Page Rating. Ads can contribute to the good user experience if they don’t get in the way of the main content and the user isn’t bombarded with ads everywhere to the point they have to go through ad after ad while looking for the main solution or content to the user query.

Some of the criteria to page rating will be to see who the website belongs to. While working on the project you will be given a landing page in the rating task to evaluate. The first thing you would do is find the homepage, then find the creator of the website, and then look to see if there is contact information. These things are important when evaluating the reputation of a website. A user should at the very least be able to contact the owner of the website should they have some problems or questions. This is very important when it comes to YMYL webpages.

Step Two: Evaluate the Quality Of The Landing Page.

The other part of your job is to analyze and evaluate the quality of the landing page and assign a rating using what is called the Page Quality Rating Scale.

The goal of the Page Quality Rating Task is to evaluate how well a web page achieves its purpose or understanding why the page was created in the first place.

In order to be a successful rater in this project, you will have to become an expert at determining how much skill, time, and effort went into designing the landing page. This means you need to also have an in-depth understanding of web pages/landing pages.

Luckily for anyone that doesn’t have this knowledge, the guidelines have some information that provides you with the key principles that you’ll need to understand webpages, and why they are an important thing when it comes to the Page Quality Rating task. But even if you think you are an expert, you should still go over the guidelines to be sure you understand the basics – because these principles mentioned are the key to your success on the project.

In the guidelines you are shown the most important aspects of a good landing page including the header, the title, and navigation of a landing page…just to mention a few. The goal is to get you to become a website detective and explorer.

The guidelines are outlined with all the definitions and internet jargon that you should make yourself familiar with.

The rating scale has 5 different ratings that you will use after you figure out what the purpose of a website is.

Lowest (1) would be pages that are harmful or malicious and try to get you to download or install something, or it may start to take over your browser with a lot of pop-up ads or windows. Pages that are untrustworthy, pages that don’t have contact information, or low-quality content should be rated as such.

Low (2) might be as above, but have an unsatisfying amount of content related to the user query.

Medium (3) may have content that is neither satisfying or unsatisfying, has little reputation information, and contains too many ads or popups.

High (4) will have a satisfying amount of content and a somewhat positive reputation.

Highest – It is very rare to give a website the very highest mark. A landing page that gets this would be a page that gives a user exhaustive information to the point they would not have to go to any other website, or spend too much time on the website to find the solution, product, or answer that the user was looking for. The website must be 100% satisfying and have contact, high reputation, and good information about who the responsible person or company is.
There are some times that a website will be disqualified from being rated. This could be because the website has adult, obscene, or illegal content. This means pages that contain any pornographic content, graphic violence including extreme gore or any type of disturbing imagery. Illegal content that includes illegal substances, pirated material, or websites that have escort services.

There are some websites that may show errors or if the page loads you see an error 404 or another landing page or splash screen saying that the content is not available.

Pages that are in another language besides the one that you contracted to work for, such as the English language, cannot be rated and therefore fall under this category.

Also watch out for pages that are nothing but ad farms, spammy looking pages that trick users into clicking on ads, or any kind of suspicious website that is asking for personal information. There are also some websites that will not allow you to look at them unless you login in order to view the content.

As always, if you need help understanding anything about this project or any other project, email me or leave a comment and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.