Google uses artificial intelligence for unknown searches

Fifteen percent of all searches that Google processes are unprecedented. Artificial intelligence is used to provide these with a good answer. The system called RankBrain has been active since early 2015.

It has been known for some time that Google is involved in artificial intelligence. In early 2014, it acquired DeepMind, and later that year a partnership was formed with researchers at Oxford University to develop new machine learning algorithms. Now Greg Corrado, a research scientist at Google, explains the application of artificial intelligence to searches.

According to Corrado, the system called RankBrain has been successfully used in a large part of the searches in recent months. The system converts large amounts of written text into vectors, or mathematical entities. If the system sees words or phrases it doesn’t recognize, RankBrain can guess which word or phrase would have a similar meaning. That would make the system better able to answer a search that has never happened before. Artificial intelligence could also handle ambiguous questions.

Corrado states that the artificial intelligence is performing above expectations. In the months that RankBrain is in operation, the system would be the fourth most important pillar for giving a search result. In all, there would be ‘hundreds’ of signals responsible for ranking the answers to a query.