In 2015, Bloomberg revealed Google's plan to shift its web search to artificial intelligence machines with Rank Brain. Since then, the machine- learning AI system has become an important part of the SEO world. You can say that the machine is better at tackling non-searched queries, especially when it is not sure about the meaning of the query. Initially, Rank Brain existed in 15% Google queries only. However, with time, the AI system has expanded appreciably to affect a majority of Google search results.
How it works?
Rank Brain leverages AI to convert textual search queries into mathematical entities, termed as word vectors. The computer can grasp these vectors or distributed representations easily, with the help of their unique coordinate addresses. Put into simple words, if the AI machine comes across an unfamiliar word or phrase, it does the guesswork to find out other words or phrases having similar meaning, and fetches the refined result accordingly.
Getting deeper into Rank Brain
The AI machine tries its best to grasp the intent of query, which otherwise holds no meaning. For instance, let's consider a query, "FIFA city". There could be several intents behind this search.
- The searcher might want to inquire about a FIFA tournament, which is about to happen or took place recently.
- The person might be currently located in a hotel near FIFA venue and is looking out to reach the stadium to attend the opening ceremony.
- The searcher might be interested to know about the winners of all the FIFA tournaments till date or may be just want to know about the defending champion.
- He might want to search for the origin city of the best FIFA player in the last season.
- The searcher might also be willing to look out for the most promising players of the ongoing / upcoming season of FIFA.
Since the FIFA 2018 is about to start recently, hence, most likely, a simplistic algorithm will show the venue of the tournament as the search result, irrespective of the main intent behind the query. However, with Rank Brain algorithm at work, the story could be different. For example, if the searcher is currently located in the venue city of the FIFA opening ceremony, Google might end up giving directions to the concerned stadium. Hence, signals such as current location of the searcher, freshness of the web content, and so on, can be significant for Rank Brain in interpreting the most satisfying results.
Optimizing for Rank Brain
It is easy to optimize your website for Rank Brain; what you require is to follow Google's advice, "Try to write content that sounds human." Yes, just write it in simple and natural language. If you start writing like machines, your website would only end end confusing this algorithm, without getting any optimization benefits. It is high time to upgrade your business and include upscale technology to acquire potential customers. Rank Brain is among the best innovations in this regard to satisfy your cause; all you need is to enjoy searching with this artificial intelligence invention!
Mohammad Atif