Google has been testing a new artificial intelligence system to help it deal with its more ambiguous searches.
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RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities – called vectors – that the computer can understand.
Google uses hundreds of “signals” created to bring users the most useful search results, of which RankBrain is only one.
For the past few months, Google has been utilizing an artificial intelligence (AI) system to help it interpret its more hard search queries, according to Bloomberg Business.
Microsoft this year released its machine learning Project Oxford set of application programming interfaces and software development kits on open source code repository Github. For instance, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?”
Instead Google’s search algorithm is based on a large set of “signals” that are combined to provide an indication of how important a page is. Corrado said its success was a surprise, telling Bloomberg “I would describe this as having gone better than we would have expected”. RankBrain is capable of making guesses if it sees words it is not familiar with. Gary Illyes from Google said it “was launched months ago”, and it doesn’t kill SEO, he said “your SEO magic still works” with it. He added that this has been worked on for months and months and the results are not “assumable” but rather “expectable”.
Multi-word queries, or long-tail queries, are likely to be most affected by RankBrain’s introduction as it can see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches.
But that was all based on Google’s Knowledge Graph: this piece of information relates to that piece of information, so we can make your search results richer.
The use of AI and machine learning feels like a natural next step after the release of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm.
Delivering relevant search results as quickly as possible has become increasingly important as more and more users conduct searches via mobile devices instead of desktops. During experiments, while human guesses were 70 percent correct, RankBrain was 80 percent, said Search Engine Land.
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“Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing”, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in the earnings call of the company held last week.
