AI System ‘RankBrain’ Interprets Google Search Queries

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is perhaps the “next big thing” with major technology companies investing heavily on R&D activities. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is also making huge investments in AI and machine learning, Bloomberg reported.

“Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation and, recently, search”, Bloomberg noted.

Explaining the emerging role of AI in search, Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company told Bloomberg that for the past couple of months, a “very large fraction” of the millions of queries a second that people search in Google have been interpreted by an AI system called “RankBrain”.

RankBrain embeds vast amounts of written language into computer understandable form, which helps Google deal with the 15 percent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before, he said. 

“If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries”, Bloomberg said.

Corrado added that RankBrain is one of the “hundreds” of signals that go into an algorithm that determines what results appear on a Google search page and even their ranking.

The system was rolled out across all of Google search in early 2015 and represents a yearlong effort by a team that started with about five Google engineers, including search specialist Yonghui Wu, and deep-learning expert Thomas Strohmann. It took a long time to ensure that the system was ranking results correctly. It has already become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.

Corrado added that RankBrain is very carefully monitored and also updated with new data periodically to help it better reason with new concepts.