Yahoo’s Luke Beatty said he is not worried.

“We welcome the change,” he insisted about Google taking aim last Friday at so-called “content farms,” producers of low-quality content that spam up the Web and the search giant’s results. “And we endorse what Google is doing 100 percent.”

That’s ironic, given among those allegedly hit hardest by changing of its famous algorithm–based on early, and perhaps questionable, surveys–is Yahoo’s Associated Content.

But, if true, and traffic at Associated Content–which the Silicon Valley Internet giant bought for $90 million last May–is indeed badly hurt, it’s obviously going to be a problem for Yahoo, which relies on advertising revenue as its core business.

A quick poll by Sistrix, a search engine optimization firm, using one million keywords before and after Google’s changes, showed that Associated Content’s “visibility index”– including keyword and ranking positions ranking and clickthrough rate–was down 93 percent.

So yesterday, Beatty, who founded Associated Content and now works at Yahoo, dialed up BoomTown to talk about what the Google shift will mean to Yahoo.

First off in the wide-ranging interview, he noted, “everything on the Web is changing all the time,” noting that Associated Content used to rely more on the now weakened Digg and RSS for its traffic and distribution.

“Obviously, that has changed and we have still managed to grow,” he said.

Beatty said it is still not clear that the new tweaks in search criteria at Google would mean for Associated Content’s offerings–coming from 400,000 contributors of all kinds.

“Our data will not be reconciled for weeks…but some will be up and some will be down,” he said, adding the overall, “I suspect it will be down, although it’s not accurate by any means in the numbers released so far, since there is no way you can know this early.”

Still, it’s obvious that Google’s latest move has not been not good for Associated Content, although Beatty noted that the Silicon Valley search king is no longer the main source of traffic for Associated Content material.

Instead, that would be the owned-and-operated sites of Yahoo, most of all, and–increasingly–social networking sites such as Facebook.

“When we sold the company, we know that sites of Yahoo itself would be the biggest driver of our growth and that was the plan,” said Beatty. “And, though smaller, social means of distribution are clearly the way people are now finding our content.”

In an email later, Beatty underscored this point:

“Search traffic is not our focus within Yahoo–it hasn’t been for 10
months…traffic sources have changed endlessly over that last six years…search is one, albeit an important one and clearly, [but] now it too is changing and we see the future of our content distribution coming from O&O properties and social networks, as much as anything.”

Still, Beatty said Associated Content will adapt as long as Google does not make its tweaks on a network basis and rather than on a site basis. (Interestingly, that would presumably include Google’s own–and often spammish–Blogger property, which is fueled by its powerful AdSense engine.)

“It appears that changes have been made on an asset-by-asset basis
is good–networkwide cramdown would be inappropriate and uneducated,” he said.

Still, the best way to fight the Google initiative is by delivering higher quality content, which Beatty said was being done at the company via a series of ongoing measures to improve overall submissions.

Those include a Yahoo style guide for content creators, a two-tiered human editor review process, analytical analysis, a featured contributor program and, interesting, an online tutorial process called the Yahoo Contributor Network.

It’s not exactly Harvard University, of course, but Beatty said there is more to come.

“We are committed to supporting and helping our contributors navigate through this and every other change in the crowdsourced content economy,” he said. “We want the best article to get more traffic.”

Of course, with Google’s doubtlessly continuing changes in its criteria for what good content is, presumably, that won’t be Yahoo’s to decide.

The IBM supercomputer and human player, Brad Rutter, each had $5,000 on the scoreboard, while Ken Jennings, who had bested Watson in the much-publicized practice match, ended with $2,000.

Watson missed some questions and in interesting ways. At one point Watson repeated a wrong answer, the “1920s,” which Jennings had just said. Host Alex Trebeck referred to these as “weird little moments.”

Watson sprang to a huge lead early. By the first commercial break, Watson had $5,200 to Rutter’s $1,000, and $200 for Jennings. It began a serious run interestingly enough after hitting the Daily Double and making a bet. This is interesting in that Watson, in the practice match which it ultimately lost, showed a weakness in situations where betting was called for. This was a weakness that Jennings exploited to his benefit. This made it a surprise when Watson threw down and bet $1,000, more than it had on the board at the time.

I asked Stephen Baker (pictured), author of the forthcoming book on the match, “Final Jeopardy,” to call me after the episode aired for a little color commentary from the point of view of someone who was in the studio to witness it. Our conversation, which I recorded on Google Voice, is below.

Steve Baker Talks about The IBM Jeopardy Challenge, Day 1 by ahess247

As ZDNet reports, Watson won the round with $4,400, while Ken Jennings had $3,400 and Brad Rutter brought in $1,200.

The game has been in the planning stages for years, and has been written about several times. The New York Times covered IBM’s work in a big story in 2009.

The whole point of teaching a computer to play “Jeopardy” lies in the complex computing work that’s required to make a machine understand natural human language and detect the same subtle cues of human speech that humans learn to understand over the years. “Jeopardy” questions can involve clever turns of phrases, riddles and other tricks of speech that can confuse a computer in ways that a game of chess won’t. Computers have already defeated humans at chess, you’ll recall, and it was an IBM computer that did it.

After the “Jeopardy” match, the human players said Watson had one distinct advantage: It doesn’t get psyched out. If another player wins a string of questions, it doesn’t suffer from the emotional response of losing confidence.

I don’t usually watch “Jeopardy,” or any game show for that matter. But I’m looking forward to seeing how the real game turns out.

Below is a rough video by ZDNet’s Larry Dignan, who attended the round.

Having bested humanity in chess 13 years ago, the supercomputing scientists at IBM say they’re finally ready to let their latest machine, named Watson, take on the two highest-earning champions of the game show “Jeopardy” in televised games that will air in February of next year.

The game has been in the planning stages for years. The New York Times covered the brewing matchup in a big takeout last year.

Why teach a computer to play “Jeopardy”? The company said it’s all about understanding natural language and detecting the subtle cues of human speech. “Jeopardy” questions can involve clever turns of phrases, riddles and other tricks of speech that can have multiple interpretations. While a computer can make fast work figuring out the best series of moves on the chess board, it’s a much taller order for a computer to answer these kinds of questions.

Take this example, which I borrowed from the J-Archive, a “Jeopardy” fan site: “This city didn’t exist at the time of the Trojan War, so Paris couldn’t have abducted Helen from there.”

A human will know that “Paris” here refers to the son of the king of Troy, not to the capital of France. That’s because we probably know a little about Greek mythology from junior high school, and even if we don’t we pick up a lot from the clue “Trojan War.”

The answer: “What is Sparta?” So, even if you don’t know the precise answer, chances are you can make a good guess by first mentally eliminating answers referring to the capital of France. The trick is in teaching the computer to go through the same process of elimination.

Earlier this year, IBM played a series of 50 “sparring games” against former “Jeopardy” champs. The two human players in the televised games are Ken Jennings (who set the record for winning 74 “Jeopardy” games in a row during the 2004-2005 season, winning $2.5 million) and Brad Rutter (who won $3.6 million–the most by a single “Jeopardy” player ever).

The grand prize for this challenge is $1 million, with $300,000 for second place and $200,000 for third. Rutter and Jennings will donate half their winnings to charity, while IBM will donate all of its winnings.

Playing “Jeopardy” is a good way to push the boundaries on a computer’s ability to answer questions posed in natural language, which IBM says will one day give computers the ability to help diagnose patients in health care settings, improve help desk calls and help tourists find their way around cities.

The machine playing is an IBM Power7 server that the company has optimized with numerous proprietary technologies to analyze spoken questions and then sift through the possibilities that might constitute the correct answer–and do it all within the stiff time limits the game requires.

If nothing else, this will get mainstream television audiences acquainted with the power of supercomputing from the comfort of their own living rooms.

While there was a lot of press coverage of the Garry Kasparov-Deep Blue chess matches in 1996 and 1997, for all the vaunted “man vs. machine” importance attached to it, I don’t recall it penetrating popular culture.

This just might. IBM, of course, hopes so.

Until the match, here is the company’s video on the pending matchup:

Kudos to our sharp-eyed former coworker, Dan Frommer, who has spotted what appears to be a nice new rollout at MTV.com: a place where you can–gasp!–watch a bunch of videos.

MTV Music seems to be what MTV.com famously should have had, but never really figured out how to do very well (actually, it’s one of several things, but that’s a longer story).

But it’s nice to see it now, regardless: clean interface, embeddable videos, social networky without actually trying to be a social-networking site.

Dan is calling this a “Hulu For Music Videos,” but that’s not the case, at least not formally. Hulu, you may recall, is an actual joint venture between GE (GE) unit NBC and News Corp.’s Fox (NWS), created in large part as a foil against YouTube, owned by Google (GOOG). (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

But the labels aren’t taking stakes in this site–MTV is just using the existing licenses in a smart way.

We’ve lobbed in calls to MTV and will report back if there’s more to say. But for now we can tell you that the site does have content from all four majors: Warner Music Group (WMG), Sony (SNE), EMI Music Group and Universal Music Group.

It does not have the video for the Killer’s new song, “Human,” which we can find on YouTube, though.

So we’ve asked our neighbor at Starbucks to pick a clip, and he’s taking responsibility for this one, which quite frankly, we’re sick of.

Enjoy: