Geeking with Greg: Machines versus humans at Google - The Diigo Meta page

• 18 Jun 09
  

  J M
• 19 Jun 08
  

  Takuya Homma

  i don't know much about search algorithm but like in some other fields, will machines surpass human in quality and quantity in search?
  
  i wanna know how the machine learning system is working.

  Google Search 7　△

  • [This] appears to be made-to-order for machine learning algorithms. Tons of training data (both from usage and from the armies of "raters" employed by Google), and a manageable number of signals (200) -- these fit the supervised learning paradigm well, bringing into play an array of ML algorithms from simple regression methods to Support Vector Machines.
    
  • And indeed, Google has tried methods such as these. Peter tells me that their best machine-learned model is now as good as, and sometimes better than, the hand-tuned formula on the results quality metrics that Google uses.
    

  • Peter suggests two reasons for this. The first is hubris: the human experts who created the algorithm believe they can do better than a machine-learned model. The second reason is more interesting. Google's search team worries that machine-learned models may be susceptible to catastrophic errors on searches that look very different from the training data. They believe the manually crafted model is less susceptible to such catastrophic errors on unforeseen query types.

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