RankBrain was first acknowledged only a few years ago by Google engineer Greg Corrado. RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query. Google’s been working on this technology for the past five years to help the search engine handle the massive increases in volume without losing accuracy. The RankBrain secret sauce is that it uses artificial intelligence to continually learn how to improve.
So the more it processes new information or new search queries for users, it actually gets better and more accurate at returning this information.
For example, Google’s algorithm “might have up to 10,000 variations or sub-signals
As you can imagine, somehow managing all of those on the fly would be incredibly difficult (if not impossible).
That’s where RankBrain comes in to help manage the workload.
Generally, the two most important ranking factors are:
- Links (and citations)
- Words (content and queries)
RankBrain helps to analyse or understand the connections between those things so Google can understand the context behind what someone’s asking.
For example, let’s say you type in the word “engineer salaries.”
Now think about that for a moment. What type of engineer salaries are you looking for?
It could be “civil,” “electrical,” “mechanical,” or even “software.”
That’s why Google needs to use several different factors to figure out exactly what you’re asking for.
But let’s say the following events played out over the past few years:
- You’re getting a degree in computer science.
- Your IP address puts on the campus of Stanford University.
- You follow tech journalists on Twitter.
- You read TechCrunch almost every single day.
- And you were just Googling “software engineer jobs” last week.
See?
Google’s able to piece all of these random bits of data together. It’s like a bunch of puzzle pieces suddenly coming together.
So now Google knows what type of “engineer salaries” to show you, even though you never explicitly asked for “software engineer salaries.”
That’s also how Google is now answering your questions before you even ask them.
For example, do a generic search right now for anything, like “pizza.”
Now, what do you see?
You see the typical ad spaces up at the top.
However, the local results below the ads are assuming that you’re asking “where to get pizza.”
The Knowledge Graph on the far right-hand side is serving up almost every fact and figure about pizza imaginable.
RankBrain can process and filter all of this data to give you answers before you even ask them.