Big machine learning

According to the New York Times, Yahoo is releasing Project Panama shortly. Project Panama is about better predicting which advertisements are relevant to a search, implying a higher click through rate, implying larger income for Yahoo. There are two things that seem interesting here:

1. A significant portion of that improved accuracy is almost certainly machine learning at work.
2. The quantitative effect is huge—the estimate in the article is $600*10⁶.

Google already has such improvements and Microsoft Search is surely working on them, which suggest this is (perhaps) a $10⁹ per year machine learning problem.

The exact methodology under use is unlikely to be publicly discussed in the near future because of the competitive enivironment. Hopefully we’ll have some public “war stories” at some point in the future when this information becomes less sensitive. For now, it’s reassuring to simply note that machine learning is having a big impact.