Artificial intelligence system. All you have heard and seen in movies are coming together in practicality and leading us to a more digitized world. Radon Media, a performance digital marketing agency is always up to date with the latest happenings in digital marketing. We analyze and bring you the latest fuss about Google’s RankBrain. Is it as complex as it sounds? Or, will this be one of the Google’s legendary innovations? Let’s decode!
As Google develops and reveals new machine learning algorithm, it has turned its searches to artificial intelligence system. In this case computer programs are created on machine learning which approximately has 10,000 signals and sub-signals, a form of AI that teaches themselves to adapt and emerge when exposed to a different environment or data that is basically different search queries.
So, the RankBrain artificial intelligence system works on the mathematical entities named as vectors which are only compatible to be understood by computer embeds vast amount of written languages. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase that it isn’t familiar with, it guesses what word or phrases might possess similar meaning and filter the search results accordingly on the page. In layman’s word RankBrain typically handles the search queries which might be ambiguous or unique and never been submitted to Google before. Think of it as a robot that continuously upgrades itself for better results and doesn’t rely on outsourcing of human intelligence or maintenance.
Let’s take a real time example. When you put an ambiguous long phrase on the search engine like “it’s a boy for niece” could have led you to many news as no specific names or unique word is mentioned in the search. But you might be seeing RankBrain working already and it gives you the results like as below:
So, it automatically understood you may be searching for the news of new born baby of George W Bush’s niece Lauren Bush. Now see how it appears when you put specific and unique search queries like “George W Bush’s niece’s boy” which means you are particularly looking for a news related to former president George W Bush.
As you can see in case of both searches one ambiguous and one specific; you get the result you are looking for! It’s very important to understand that RankBrain is a signal and inks or words on a page can be signals and they can be associated with users. It takes more complexity to understand how RankBrain uses plethora of additional information or elements to classify and filter the right data a user is looking for.
So how important it is in the search engine algorithms?
Google uses signals to determine webpage rankings. It has more than 200 major ranking signals and RankBrain is believed to be third most important signal. If we quote Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist @Google correctly “RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and where they are ranked. In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query”.
Will RankBrain change the SEO?
SEO is what it used to filter and present content to the users primarily targeting the keywords that are put. Now, with RankBrain SEO will not be any more of keyword targeting. RankBrain interprets languages, words, systems and guess more accurately than a human as lot of the times user don’t put search queries. So, how do you manage your organic traffic and SEO ranking when it’s managed by machine learning? Since Google processes over 3 billion searches per day, it means that more than 450 million of those searches are new. Targeting and measuring the keywords to optimize relevance of webpages may produce biased results especially in case of long search queries put. RankBrain analyses the intent behind those keywords and hence filters the results more accurately and moves out the irrelevant ones (as mentioned in the example above).
RankBrain follows a pattern of discovering and learning user behavior to optimize SEO, collects user insights based on their conversations, strikes a chord between what user has searched for and what they really want.
Hence RankBrain is claimed to be the 3rd most important ranking factor to drive value based SEO.
Is the society leaning towards artificial intelligence? Should you be scared?
Yes. RankBrain is certainly smarter than your average engineer. In a recent study with a limited sample size from Google office, engineers were asked to guess on certain search results that Google search engine would end up filtering. While all human collectively guessed 70 percent of the time right; RankBrain the artificial intelligence algorithm had 80 percent success rate. It wasn’t easy to come up to this level. Releasing RankBrain took a yearlong tenure to successfully complete all the developments. Although RankBrain is carefully monitored by human or engineers it raise a question of shifting towards artificial intelligence. So, in near future do we see machines taking over human jobs? Isn’t it already been rolled in lot of sectors? A number of experts has expressed their concern on rise of artificial intelligence while certainly it’s a legendary innovation; it also comes with some cons forecasted for future.
It was a great decision by Google to introduce machine learned RankBrain as lot of companies are entrusting machine controlled business systems for the most valuable results.
As we may understand by now what RankBrain is actually up to, we may also learn what it isn’t. As Google has something on the other hand to do every day with their products whether it’s a new development or movement we clear your confusions ever. As a digital marketer you must’ve heard about Knowledge Graph which is also an artificial intelligence system. Well, RankBrain is not a variation form previously existed Knowledge Graph. Although RankBrain is a part of the Google’s newly developed algorithm Hummingbird; it isn’t exactly an updated version or a system to assist Hummingbird. Its lot more different than Panda, Penguin etc. It’s moreover a modified system that work hand in hand with Hummingbird to generate more appropriate search result.
Radon media, as an SEO agency could only hope for adding more values to the SEO campaigns with constant development by Google. Last but not the least our human intelligence supports the best for your ROI deliverables. Stay tuned to Radon Media blogs for more analysis and updates!
