YouTube Uses "LOLs" to Rank Funny Videos

Google, despite more recent developments, is all about algorithms. It built its search engine around them, it built its ad business around them and it's doing the same for most of its other products, including YouTube.

YouTube needs ways of discovering and raking content while dealing with 48 hours of uploads every minute. This is why it's been trying to find out if it can build algorithms that can determine whether a cover song is any good and, more recently, whether a video is funny or not.

As you can imagine, these are hard problems for a computer to crack, but the Google Research team has been testing their data with willing, human test subjects.

The algorithm it came up with uses anything from audible laughter in the video to how many "o's" there are in the "loool" comments. You can check it out in action and help improve it in the Comedy Slam.