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Comment by inerte | Hacker News Reader

Everything in there makes sense imho except the Yellow Image Count. Anyone knows why that would be a factor?

It's been a long time since I've read it, but I vaguely remember a write-up many years ago (before we used ML for NSFW detection) about how either yellow images would often produce false positives in popular detection algos, and/or about how the yellow-ness of an image could be used as a lower-tech proxy for basic NSFW detection (seemingly because of its proximity to some common skin tones).

I don't know if either of these are relevant here, but it's possible a weight on Yellow Images could be related to NSFW images.

Upon closer inspection, they have a lot of weights regarding "yellowness" [0], and several of them say "based on Toloka", which is an antifraud service that assigns colors to violation levels [1].

So my suspicion above is probably wrong, and "yellow" images probably refer to a Toloka score/color for whatever domain the images are hosted on.

[0] https://yandex-explorer.herokuapp.com/search?q=yellow&o=all

[1] https://join.toloka.ai/blog/project-limits/

Wrong Toloka. Yandex has its own Toloka which is a crowdsourcing platform for repetitive tasks that inherently require a human in the loop. In other words, this factor comes from real human assessors hired via Toloka.

No, but can you explain the distance to Ankara one?

well now you're making me doubt myself, that's a weird one too. My first guess was "they need to know how far one request is from another, and Ankara is a good as any city"

So say suppose you're in New Orleans and I am in San Jose, now we can compare our distance, because geographical distance usually equates to cultural differences and perceptions of quality.

They have a Turkish version, so I guess this props up Turkish results to requests from Turkey (granted, Ankara is not exactly in the middle of the country ;-)

Ankara is the nearest city to Kırşehir, considered by some to be the geographical centre of the world (as viewed on a typical flat map).

there was exactly one other similar one (Distance to Madagan) which is a random russian town. So I think it might be deciding which of their datacenters should serve the request?

It is a bit funny to see people trying to guess the meaning of something which is a common knowledge elsewhere. Puts a perspective on all the talk about “modern, global, connected, automatically translated world”.

For a decade and a half, Yandex has had a codename for each big revision of search ranking algorithms and release of new search features. Most were city names, and Magadan was one of them. So “distance” is probably a distance to some rating introduced in that release. Whether it is a positive or negative factor (cutting obvious over-optimized sites), I have no idea.

Ankara is the capital of Turkey. For RU, UA & BY locales they have separate ranking models for queries from their capitals, but not for TR. Maybe, guessing, they did not have enough data to build two TR models and this additional input feature was good enough

I’m pretty sure yellow is a slang for a category of images. It could be ad images.

Could be! Perhaps as in Yellow Pages?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

In other words, clickbait images from clickbait ad networks.

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