This week one of our mad geniuses in residence, Ben Hendrickson, steps in front of the camera to discuss something a little different: Machine Learning.

Ben is one of the folks that designed and built the technology behind Linkscape, so he's certainly studied this topic thoroughly. Here he'll talk about how and why advancements, findings, and theories that emerge from the larger machine learning field have significant relevance to search, and why paying attention to those findings can help show us how the engines may change and adjust in the future.




SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Machine Learning from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.


And for reference, here are two of the papers Ben mentions in the video:

"A Fast Learning Algorithm for Deep Belief Nets" by Hinton and Osindero.  2006.

"A Machine Learning Architecture for Optimizing Web Search Engines" by Boyan, Freitag, and Joachims.  1996