Now there’s a new, artificial intelligence-powered search technology that’s becoming increasingly important for Google: RankBrain.
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The majority of the world’s Google searches have already been searched, but new, ambiguous queries can cause hiccups. In an experiment, the company found disabling the AI “would be as damaging to users as forgetting to serve half the pages on Wikipedia” after establishing that RankBrain could guess which pages Google would return in search results with an 80 percent success rate.
The system is being used on what one Google research scientist calls a “very large fraction” of the search queries handled by Google.
By embedding the words into mathematical vectors, RankBrain can look for words and phrases it has never seen before. RankBrain helps Google decipher the approximately 15% of phrases that the search engine has not encountered before, Bloomberg reports.
Corrado said that has quickly become the third most important signal, especially when it comes to processing ambiguous queries. That was surprising, Corrado said, noting that it has gone better than they expected.
Corrado says RankBrain is different from the “hundreds” of signals and technologies that contribute to Google’s Search algorithms in that it actually learns and improves over time.
“Contrary to much of current theory and practice, the statistics of the data we observe shifts very rapidly, the features of interest change as well, and the volume of data often precludes the use of standard single-machine training algorithms”, Google said on its research page for artificial intelligence and machine learning. The humans only managed 70 percent.
The effort expanded to dozens of people after Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president of search, gave the green light for it to be rolled out across all of Google search in early 2015. To get a better handle on those, the company has quietly enlisted the help of a new AI system: RankBrain. Facebook Inc. uses AI techniques to filter the newsfeed that comprises the personalized homepage of the social network and Microsoft Corp.is using artificial intelligence to increase the capabilities of its Bing search engine. “Machine learning isn’t just a magic syrup that you pour onto a problem and it makes it better”.
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During last week’s financial earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing”.
