Meet Rankbrain, The new Google Artificial Intelligence responsible for searches.
Move over Hummingbird algorithm, Rankbrain is here to help Google determine search results. Rankbrain is here to stay with the responsibility of understanding our searches alongside the search algorithm, impacting on SEO results.
If you don’t know what Hummingbird does, it’s primary function is to assess different pages that appear when a particular search is made and even more importantly, which is most relevant.
Rankbrain seems to be identifying what information the user is searching for, through ambiguous questions that have never been submitted to Google before.
FACT: 15% of searches daily are brand new Google searches they have never seen before. That’s approx. 450 million searches per day that are unique.
AI smarter than Googles Engineers
So far, Rankbrain is living up to its AI hype. Google search engineers, who spend their days crafting the algorithms that underpin the search software, were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top. While the humans guessed correctly 70 percent of the time, Rankbrain had an 80 percent success rate.
All learning Rankbrain does is offline. Batches of hihistoricalata that have been built up are then imported and future predictions are then made from this data.
AI Doesn’t Google Already Have Different Ways To Find Pages Beyond The Exact Search?
Yes,Google has been able to find pages beyond the exact term someone is entering for a very long time. At the beginning if you didn’t enter the exact keyword Google may have not found the page for example “phone” and “phones” being two different words would yield completely different results, until “Stemming” came in which allowed Google to get smarter around it’s search results and understanding the variations of different words and relevance.
It further learnt conceptual smarts to understand that there are different pages about Apple the tech company versus apple the fruit.
What does this all mean for my companies SEO results?
Google considers Rankbrain quite important and is considered the third most important signal that Google bases its search rank results on. Rankbrain can actually look into the intent of the search, not just the keywords. It’s trying to be more “human” in the way that it provides search results to you.
It all comes back to creating relevant content that is naturally read, rather than using old-techniques such as keyword “stuffing” and manipulation ti rank higher for search terms. Not only will relevant and natural content be awarded with Rankbrain, but it gives the visitor a far better experience with content rich information. Win, win!
By Anthony Baxter