Google GOOGL +1.11% announced yesterday that they were adding another layer to their already complicated ranking algorithm. This time, they were focusing on machine learning and are calling this update, RankBrain.
As I covered in a recent article, machine learning has been making inroads into the search algorithms for quite some time now. Apple has publicly announcedtheir own forays into search and machine learning, and Bing has talked about it extensively.
And at our digital agency we’re always paranoid about changes Google makes to their algorithm. So, we jumped right in when we heard the news and tried to decipher what all of this means for marketers.
But what are we really talking about when we discuss machine learning and the search engine algorithms?
This Oct. 20, 2015 photo shows the Google logo outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google, reports quarterly financial results Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, FIle)
Still Human Run
Even though we’d like to think that a company worth 100’s of billions of dollars, like Google and Apple, should have advanced technologies that us mere mortals haven’t even heard of, the truth of the matter is, they still have a lot of manual processes and antiquated code wrapped up into their operating systems and search algorithms.
So, while they may not have developed warp drive yet, they have been trying to remove the human element from their search algorithms. The reason being is that humans can only process what they know and what they recognize. And gathering data to learn from is a very manual process.