RANKBRAIN: GOOGLE’S AI ALGORITHM
On October 26, 2015, Google unveiled its newest algorithm, RankBrain.
What is RankBrain?
RankBrain is an artificial intelligence (AI) system that sorts through Google’s indexed content and provides the most relevant websites for particular queries. RankBrain is one of many algorithms that make up Google Hummingbird. Hummingbird is Google’s overall search algorithm that consists of Panda, Penguin, RankBrain and others.
How does RankBrain work?
RankBrain is just one component of Google’s search algorithm, but its goal is to answer unique queries that Google has never seen before.
Now, according to Danny Sullivan, Google answers 100 billion searches per month. That equates to over 3 billion searches a day. On top of that, roughly 18% of daily search queries have never been asked before.
Therefore, 500+ million searches/day have never been seen before. Answering those queries has been a difficult process, but this is RankBrain’s strength.
RankBrain’s purpose is to interpret queries that may not contain the exact words/phrases that the searcher is looking for. Essentially, it attempts to re-route misguided searches.
How important is RankBrain?
According to Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google, RankBrain is the third-most important ranking signal contributing to the result of a search query. That’s huge!
Google has over 200 hundred rankings signals, all of which are unknown, but highly speculated. For a Google employee to say outright that it’s the 3rd most important ranking signal is big news.
