OBJECT: How Google’s algorithm finds the funniest videos on Youtube

TYPE: Investigation in the Google’s back office

ORIGIN: Stan Schroeber for Mashable 

What you should know:

Can humor be quantified? That’s the question journalist Stan Schroeber tried to answer for the website Mashable and Google would ”more or less” have accomplished this feat. The Mountain View company has recently developed an algorithm wich determines a ranking of the Youtube’s funniest videos.

Here is how engineer Sanketh Shetty explains the project:

“We focused on videos uploaded in the comedy category. We captured the uploader’s belief in the funniness of their video via features based on title, description and tags. Viewers’ reactions, in the form of comments, further validate a video’s comedic value”

For Stan Schroeber this is where it gets interesting, as Google engineers tried to analyze what exactly makes a user comment indicative of a video being funny: capitalization on comments (LOL), elongation (loooooool), repetition (lolololol), exclamation (lolllll!!!!!), and combinations thereof.

For Stan, while Google’s methodology seems sound, humor is a very subjective category and we’re sure that many users won’t agree with Google’s choice.

You can see the results of the experiment on Google’s Comedy Slam leaderboard.

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