YouTube continues in its efforts to maximize viewer delight by simplifying its ranking processes. The latest is a move to rank comedy videos based on their humor quotient, which in turn is determined by the intensity of viewers comments.

Research team at this Google enterprise have now developed an algorithm that will scan viewer reactions and quantify various expressions, such as LOL, LoooooL, ROFL and other similar comments. The quantification is part of a new and more practical formula to determine the popularity of comedy videos.

The newly developed formula follows the typical way a smarter YouTube visitor/user decides before hitting the play button. Most of us choose to skim over the comments to see if there are any smart sounding reactions. In the case of funny/comedy videos, we look for expressions like LOL, loooooool, ROFLMAOs, hehehes, number of exclamation marks, etc. The more we find such expressions in the comments, the more we are convinced it would be fun watching/downloading. Only then, do we scroll up to play the video.

ROFLMAO, LOL: new pointers for YouTube’s comedy ranking
ROFLMAO, LOL: new pointers for YouTube’s comedy ranking

The new algorithm was designed by researchers based at Google’s London office. A member of the team described the algorithm in typical geeky style as a “passive-aggressive ranking using human-annotated pair-wise ground truth”!!!

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Huh?! Wonder what he meant! But I think you got the message: the more expressive the comments the higher the ranking on the ‘funniness meter’. Yeah, we ‘Superlike’.

By Rajeev Rana

Founder and Chief Editor - gogi.in