Most of the queries from all over the world that are being typed into Google's search box have already been done before. However, for new and ambiguous search results, the company has been using a new artificial intelligence system named RankBrain.
The goal of artificial intelligence, which is the extreme form of machine learning, is the creation of software that have the ability to learn about its surroundings and the world. Google has been among the biggest sponsors of artificial intelligence research, which has been applied to different functions of videos, translations, speech, and as revealed, also on search.
Bloomberg reported that over the previous few months, a "very large fraction" of the millions of search queries being sent in to Google's search engine went through RankBrain, according to senior research scientist Greg Corrado.
RankBrain functions through the utilization of artificial intelligence in embedding massive amounts of words into vectors that the computer understands. If the system comes across a search term that it does not know, RankBrain attempts to guess what the word or phrase means then filters results accordingly. This makes RankBrain more effective when it comes to processing search queries that have never been asked before.
According to Corrado, about 15 percent of the search queries that Google receives daily have never been asked before, and RankBrain is effective in handling these queries. RankBrain is also able to effectively deal with ambiguous search queries, with the system able to do so through its utilization of artificial intelligence.
Google is using hundreds of different "signals" that have been designed to provide users with the most effective results to search queries, and RankBrain is only one of these signals. However, Google is claiming that RankBrain has already proven its effectiveness and has become the third-most important signal that contributes to Google's search results.
The addition of the artificial intelligence-powered system to Google's search engine is a part of the company's push into using artificial intelligence in every aspect of the company's business.
"Machine learning is a core transformative way by which we are rethinking everything we are doing," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in the earnings call of the company held last week.
