
How the Yahoo homepage predicts your clicks - mjfern
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/23/yahoo_core_personalization/
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noelwelsh
If you want details on the tech. go read some of John Langford's publications
(<http://research.yahoo.com/John_Langford>) and the rest of the Machine
Learning group at Yahoo (<http://research.yahoo.com/Machine_Learning>). I
sometimes joke that Myna (<http://www.mynaweb.com> \-- ob plug for my
startup!) should be renamed the John Langford Appreciation Society.

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rg

      *"The system knows that women generally favor stories 
      about Brad Pitt, but after some real-time analysis, it 
      can quickly realize that men are far more like to click 
      on a Brad Pitt story that involves a sports movie."*
    

This is like Michael Frayn's first comic novel "The Tin Men" (1965), about
programming a computer to produce an "automated newspaper".

    
    
      "But people really preferred an air crash. ... What
      people enjoyed most was about 70 dead, with some 20
      survivors including children rescued after at least
      one night in open boats.  They liked it to be backed
      up with a story about a middle-aged housewife who had
      been booked to fly aboard the plane but who had 
      changed her mind at the last moment."

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madars
Yury Lifshits (then a research scientist at Yahoo! Research) did a talk at
Estonian Summer School on Computer Science called "Intro to Content
Optimization" [1], where he explained one of the approaches. It makes an
interesting read.

[1] -- <http://yury.name/esscass/>

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jcfrei
very interesting to see how steadily machine learning algorithms creep into
our news feeds (eg. facebook) and deliver us with the the links we're most
likely to click. but i fear that this will lead to a serious decline in
editorial quality, leaving an endless stream of cute kittens and hair styling
tips. who will tell us what's really going on if some algorithm decides what's
newsworthy and what's not?

~~~
seabee
That will happen if the role of editor is replaced rather than (as Yahoo is
doing) augmented.

I don't think you should fear a decline in editorial quality as much as you
should fear the devaluation of news. If people want quality they must be
willing to pay for it. If they don't want to, whose fault is that?

