It's no exaggeration to say that Google RankBrain has been a revolution in the way search results are determined. In 1996, the idea of links as a ranking signal revolutionized search with what would become Google PageRank. That's why the last decade of search market share looks like this: Global search engine market share Statista A lot has happened, and many Banner Design massive overhauls and algorithms have been introduced since then, but arguably none as big as RankBrain. Advertising Continue reading below As we will see below, this is not only due to its impact on the results (although it arguably wins there too), but rather what it meant: machine learning was introduced in this which we consider to be research for the first time. Machine learning had been used in Google News Banner Design before this, but nothing we were seeing with RankBrain. So it was important. It was revolutionary. It was the introduction of machine learning into research. But … What is RankBrain? RankBrain is a system by which
Google can better understand the likely intent of a Banner Design search query's user. It was rolled out in the spring of 2015, but wasn't announced until October 26 of that year. When it was created, RankBrain was applied to queries that Google hadn't encountered before, which then accounted for, and still does, about 15% of all searches. It grew from there to impact all search results. At its core, RankBrain is a machine learning system based on Hummingbird, which Banner Design moved Google from a “channels” environment to a “things” environment. Advertising Continue reading below That is, one had to "read" literal characters, and instead "see" the entity they represented. A quick tour of entities and things on strings To illustrate this important advancement and its role in RankBrain, we Banner Design simply need to consider the characters that make up the name of one of my peers and friends: "Jason Barnard" Until Hummingbird,
Google saw these characters and a collection of 2 words and 13 characters that, arranged in that order and used quite often on a page, made it relevant to the search string “jason barnard”. It could be any Jason, it didn't matter. They relied on links and a few other signals, to surface the most "relevant", without understanding who or what Jason was. With Hummingbird, my friend Banner Design is no longer just a collection of characters but rather has become the entity: /g/11cm_q3wqr What is the machine id of this guy: Jason Barnard A Computer ID in this case is an alphanumeric sequence that Google assigns to an entity. We can't dive into the details of entities in this article, although you Banner Design can read more here. In short, what happened with Hummingbird that was necessary for RankBrain to work, did it prevent Google from seeing the statement: “Jason Barnard is a friend of Dave Davies who loves red shirts and is a digital marketer.