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Is there any reason why google has made this a web service rather than an open-source API?

I can see them wanting to keep some of these things close to their chest, but when it comes to most applications of ML it seems like the devil is in the details. A basic/google-backed/widely-accepted/open-source library of ML algorithms would be nice.

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seems they can leverage their distributed cluster to do the work, so in theory, things that can be parallelized would be.

Here you go: http://code.google.com/p/sofia-ml

This is, as far as I know, code directly related to a learning to rank work by some googlers, not at all a generic library blessed by google.

Hmm... I assumed it was google-backed because the author has published a few of the algorithms in well-known conferences using his google email, but yes, this code is probably not used extensively, if at all, internally.

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