Google: Our Quality Algorithms Don't Use Machine Learning In A Targeted Way

John Mueller from Google answered a question about if Google's search quality algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin and others, use machine learning these days. I assume the question was asked by Glenn Gabe and John Mueller basically said Google doesn't use them in a "targeted way." He explained that it might be used for determining as a whole if a site is good or bad but not specifically for specific types of penalties.

Truth is, his answer isn't 100% clear. Let me share the question and answer:

Glenn Gabe asked:

Is machine learning being used by Google's quality algorithms to determine what is disruptive, annoying or aggressive from a usability standpoint? For example I need to find clunky user interfaces aggressive advertising, deceptive ads etc?

John Mueller answered:

I don't know, so I don't think we were currently looking into any of these items specifically.

It might be that our quality algorithms are looking at this a bigger picture view to try to figure out what is a sign of a good website, what's a sign of a bad website. Maybe some of this kind of correlates with what happens on good and bad websites.

But there are also lots of really good, high-quality websites that use kind of annoying monetization methods. So it's something where I don't know if you could map like the monetization method to the quality of the content and really draw a line like that.

So from that point of view I don't know if that would be something that our algorithms would explicitly use like that. I suspect maybe some of this is flowing into our algorithms in general but not in a very targeted way at the moment.

Here is the video embed so you can watch it yourself, it starts at the 1:33 mark, so right away:

Here are more stories from us on machine learning in Google's search algorithms:

• Google: Penguin Doesn't Use Machine Learning Within The Algorithm
• Google: Machine Learning Won't Take Over The Google Algorithm
• Google: Machine Learning Can Be Used To Make New Ranking Signals Out Of Old Ones
• Former Google Spam Fighter: Machine Learning Already In Spam Algorithms
• Google: Machine Learning For Spam Detection & Search Quality Is Coming
• Google's Use Of Machine Learning In Ranking & Spam Algorithms Is Complicated
• Google's Paul Haahr: We Don't Fully Understand RankBrain

Forum discussion at Twitter.