‘RankBrain’ Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Google Answer Ambiguous Questions

It’s common to say you want to “Google something” when in reality you just want to search for something on the internet, that’s how deep Google has embedded itself in our hearts and minds.

Most people don’t notice when Google updates its search engine with new algorithms.

For the past few months, Google has been utilizing an artificial intelligence (AI) system to help it interpret its more hard search queries, according to Bloomberg Business.

The system is being used on what one Google research scientist calls a “very large fraction” of the search queries handled by Google. Apparently a few 15 percent of searches made every single day haven’t been seen before by Google Search, so it can’t provide that level of information that the user might be expecting, and this is where the new artificial intelligence comes in handy. RankBrain works by transforming words into “vectors”, or mathematical entities, which Google’s search engine can use to find similar words or phrases.

That’s the job of Google’s artificial intelligence system RankBrain, which was revealed in a Bloomberg story on Monday.

The difference between AI systems such as RankBrain and Google’s existing “signals” that make up its algorithm for searches is that while the latter are based on discoveries and insights from developers, they do not learn.

RankBrain is reportedly also more effective at sussing out the meaning behind complicated, ambiguous queries.

“I would describe this as having gone better than we would have expected”, he says. RankBrain’s success rate was 10 percent higher.

The effort expanded to dozens of people after Amit Singhal, the company’s senior vice president of search, gave the green light for it to be rolled out across all of Google search in early 2015.

Ongoing advances in machine learning and AI are being used by Google and many other tech companies to make their systems faster, smarter and more responsive, even as the volumes of data they must handle expand dramatically. Facebook Inc. uses AI techniques to filter the newsfeed that comprises the personalized homepage of the social network and Microsoft Corp.is using artificial intelligence to increase the capabilities of its Bing search engine.

During last week’s financial earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing”.