Google has been using a system called “RankBrain” and a process called ‘machine-learning’ otherwise known as artificial intelligence to help sort through its search results since late last year and along with Content and Link Structure, Rankbrain has been confirmed as the three most important ranking signals for search engine optimisation, i.e. seo.
Understandably many people, including SEO’s and webmasters were wondering what RankBrain would do for search, SEO and websites in general but many non SEO’s also had some questions, including whether Google was a real life Cyberdyne Systems and RankBrain the beginning of the end with SkyNet?
NB: The only end in sight would seem to be for further instalments of the woeful Terminator Genisys film, but I digress.
What is RankBrain?
As stated RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system developed by Google that helps process its search results using machine learning, which is basically a form of artificial intelligence A.I, in which computer programs and algorithms can learn from and make predictions on data in order to develop and change when exposed to different types of data such as search engine queries.
How does RankBrain work?
RankBrain processes vast amounts of written language into mathematical formats called ‘vectors’ that a computer can understand, then if RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, using this information in the vectors it can then ‘guess’ what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the results accordingly thus making RankBrain more effective at handling never seen before search queries typed into Google.
Unique Questions
The novel system helps Google deal with the vast amount of unique searches it receives each and every day with questions and conversational searches having exploded recently with the likes of Siri and Cortana being so accessible via Smartphones.
Google anticipates that 15% percent of the total queries a day it gets now are unique searches that its systems have never seen before. As Google processes 3bn searches per day this means that some 450m per day are entirely unique in nature, and a trend that will certainly increase.
It might be hard to digest that no one has asked Google that Donald Trump question yet but the answer lies in the possibility that RankBrain is still in its infancy and therefore only processing US based searches? It has been reported in a number of SEO and Search resources that RankBrain is currently active only from Mountain View (aka Googleplex) the corporate headquarters mega complex of Google, Inc. and its parent company Alphabet Inc, which is located in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, in the United States but this isn’t confirmed.
Where does RankBrain fit in with SEO and Search?
RankBrain in short is one tool in the box (of many) that Google uses in determining all of the factors that go into making its Search Engine work. For ease it would be a good idea to think of Hummingbird as being the chief algorithm at the centre of it all amalgamating all of the constituent elements such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement with RankBrain being an interface between what we the humans want to see in our content, and what the search index of Google has to offer.
In terms of SEO RankBrain in theory should see sites who serve content written for humans (not Google) rank better over time as the message from Google (from day one) has always been to serve its users the most relevant and qualitative content.
As such, you could argue that whilst predecessors to the Hummingbird algorithm could be manipulated or circumvented to a certain degree (in the short term) Google just got a lot smarter in teaching its algorithm to think more like a human would, and crucially to learn for itself and in doing so it has gotten (in theory) a lot closer to finding and serving up the content that a human would actually want to see.
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