SEO News: Google Announce the launch of Machine Learning Algorithm

Google seems intent to spiral the human race into the future. Or if sensationalists in the digital marketing arena are to be believed, the brink of world destruction! Of course, the latter mind-warp is not really true, film fans are simply drawing on inspiration from the movie, Terminator, where robots programmed with artificial intelligence try and take over the world. And now Google has its very own artificial intelligence robots. Codenamed RankBrain, the search engine can match unique search terms by intuitively recognising patterns of words.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is not exactly the artificial intelligence machine the media claim – not yet at least! But the algorithm can improve results with search sentiment. Together with Hummingbird’s semantic search capacity which understands the context of content, RankBrain digs a little deeper to find matching results based on previous user behaviour. When an end user types in a search term, Google runs a check against webpages stored in its private indexing and produces results. But the search engine receives around 15% of unique and ambiguous searches a day. And Hummingbird was struggling to find satisfactory results. Google’s developers then came up with RankBrain to intuitively compare words and meanings in ambiguous search terms, with indexed content that has performed well against similar words.

What does RankBrain mean for marketers?

RankBrains primary function is to deliver search results based on patterns of previous users. So if a website appeared in search results previously, but users left almost immediately, Google consider that page is not relevant to the search.Or the content is sub-standard. Either way, the page will fall down the rankings. From a marketing point of view, the improved Hummingbird algorithm emphasises the need for rich, quality content that is tightly focused. When writing content therefore, you no longer have to use anchor text words such as “Digital Marketing agency in Hong Kong”. In the example above, the location does not always need to be embedded in the page copy providing the contact page is flagged as a digital marketing agency in Hong Kong. Essentially, Google’s latest algorithm update allows marketers to use natural language without having to focus on keywords.

Read more about Rank Brain and what Google’s machine learning algorithm means for marketers here.

Author: Jonathan Gillespie