Google announced yesterday that another layer will be padded on top of it's already existing search engine algorithm. They're calling it RankBrain, and it's a little bit different from the other layers.
After Alphabet Inc., as Bloomberg tells, recorded company high earnings, pumped up executives moved to further expand the company's investments in artificial intelligence and learning. RankBrain is one intelligence that the company will be placing a lot of emphasis on.
In fact, the past few months, a very large fraction of Google's billions of queries received were answered by the system as The Verge reports. Of all the queries Google gathers daily, 15% of them are never heard before data. RankBrain is helping them answer those issues.
RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed large amounts of written language into mathematical entities, vectors, that computers can understand. What happens when RankBrain encounters a word or phrase it is not familiar with, it makes a calculated guess to what that word could be and thus make it more effective at handling queries it never encountered.
The artificial intelligence layer is not an alternative nor a replacement for Google's Hummingbird. It's function is to supplement and assist hummingbird in queries that will involve guessing and machine learning.
Search Engine Land shares that in 2013, unidentifiable searches numbered about 450 Million daily. Many of those unidentifiable searches were long tail queries. RankBrain aims to bring that number down significantly.
Say for instance, if a user would search "How many tablespoons are there in one cup?" before RankBrain, one would have a long list of results that wouldn't give you the measurement you're looking for because Google doesn't process like a human brain that processes and understands words, but like a robot that understands code and numbers. Now with RankBrain as an automated intelligence for Google, it can take that long tail query and "predict" an answer for it based on a long history of similar searches.
Google RankBrain has now become the third most important signal (out of 200 signals now existing).
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