
An AI system has become the third-most important signal to Google search results - adventured
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-26/google-turning-its-lucrative-web-search-over-to-ai-machines
======
sosuke
So PageRank was an algorithm, and RankBrain is an AI? I'd love to understand a
bit more of what makes them different from each other. I don't feel as though
I've seen the search results become any better. In fact I've been frustrated
by how many words it leaves out without telling me. Or how it says "here are
the results to your search" when in all honesty it had 0 results to my search.

~~~
kjhughes
Verbatim search is what you want: On the search results page, choose "Search
tools -> All results -> _Verbatim_ "

~~~
brillenfux
Is there a way to set this permanently? I couldn't find anything.

~~~
Nadya
Perform a search then change the setting to Verbatim. Right click the search
bar and "Add as Keyword" or "Add as Search Engine" (depending if you are using
Firefox or Chrome)

Then give it a keyword, I use "vg" for "Verbatim Google".

Then in the Navbar I can type "vg foo bar", which will search "foo bar"
verbatim. Closest thing to permanent once you get used to using keywords (
which are awesome by the way :D )

~~~
eco
I didn't see the Add as Search Engine option in Chrome Dev.

Specifically, the url you want to use is:
[https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1](https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1)

Good tip. I use a similar one with site:en.wikipedia.com and I'm Feeling Lucky
to quickly jump to wikipedia articles.

------
mappingbabeljc
Hiya. For those interested, the RankBrain approach of converting words and
phrases into vectors ties directly to Geoff Hinton's more ambitious ideas
about AI. He speaks about it a bit from 32 mins in, in this video from the
Royal Society in London earlier this year.

Geoff Hinton - "If we can convert a sentence into a vector that captures the
meaning of the sentence, then google can do much better searches, they can
search based on what is being said in a document. Also, if you can convert
each sentence in a document into a vector, you can then take that sequence of
vectors and try and model why you get this vector after you get these vectors,
that's called reasoning, that's natural reasoning, and that was kind of the
core of good old fashioned AI and something they could never do because
natural reasoning is a complicated business, and logic isn't a very good model
of it, here we can say, well, look, if we can read every English document on
the web, and turn each sentence into a thought vector, we've got plenty of
data for training a system that can reason like people do. Now, you might not
want to reason like people do on the web, but at least we can see what they
would think."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcOMKXAw5VA)

------
sanxiyn
"In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most
important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said."

Do we know what is the most and the second-most important signal?

~~~
mappingbabeljc
Hiya. Author here. They wouldn't tell me. Asked a lot.

~~~
Cacti
Presumably it's 1. personal data or some amalgamation of meta data thereof, 2.
page rank, 3. rank brain

~~~
TheSoftwareGuy
personal data and such would almost certainly be below page rank.

~~~
frandroid
Not if that includes the geographical location of the query...

------
robotresearcher
The article uses this query as a motivating example:

"What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?"

But the results page (for me) does not contain the words 'apex predator'. The
top result is the wikipedia page for "Consumer (food chain)", which does
contain that term.

It would have been very cool if the AI could have identified the concept
described by the query. But it didn't. It just found a very relevant page for
three strings in the query.

The journalist doesn't report on the results of this example. Who came up with
it and why?

~~~
yanose
Google will get to apex predator if I search

"what predator is at the top of the food chain?" or "what type of animal is at
the top of the food chain?"

but it fails to do so if I ask "what consumer is at the top of the food
chain?"

It seems like "consumer" is too ambiguous to work in this example.

------
bronlund
This is presented as if AI is a new thing to Google. The truth is that
Pagerank is based on a classic neural network. The pages are the nodes, the
links are the weights and we are the feedback. It has been in training since
at least 1996 ;)

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
I know neural networks are fashionable these days, but come on.

~~~
bronlund
It's not that it's a secret. Consider this quote from early 2000: Reporter:
"Why would we need another search engine? Alta Vista is quite good enough." \-
Larry Page: "We're not building a search engine. We're building an A.I."

------
fiatmoney
By inference, this looks to be "just" integrating a deep semantic embedding
(presumably neural network based) of the individual webpages as a signal into
their existing ranking framework.

AI is a stretch, but it is cool.

~~~
raverbashing
> deep semantic embedding (presumably neural network based)

Probably not. My bet is that it is word2vec based

[https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/](https://code.google.com/p/word2vec/)

~~~
mappingbabeljc
Hiya. They wouldn't explicitly confirm that it is word2vec, but everything we
discussed indicated it's likely doing something roughly equivalent to
word2vec, and is also doing similar conversions for sequences which is likely
connected to Sequence to Sequence learning (PDF:
[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-
learni...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-
with-neural-networks.pdf)). It also links to Geoff Hinton's stuff on Thought
Vectors which implicitly involves word2vec.

------
amelius
So any ideas about how RankBrain works? I suppose it is a neural network (or a
bunch of them). But what are the input and output quantities?

------
jorangreef
Google seems to be getting worse with technical queries. I spend many queries
just trying to craft a query that gets the results I am looking for. This is
especially true for keywords where case is important. Google seems to just
neglect case as a signal.

~~~
hartator
Yeah, I also feel the "" to force Google to find an exact match is simply
ignored in most requests since a few months.

~~~
moultano
Do you remember any examples I could debug? You can check your search history
here:
[https://history.google.com/history/](https://history.google.com/history/) if
you have it turned on.

~~~
rishubhav
One of the most annoying for code searches is that the engine seems to ignore
punctuation, even in quotations. For example, searching for

"the quick brown fox; jumped over the lazy dog"

returns hits for the version without the semicolon

~~~
jstimpfle
I think that "A*" (the algorithm) has started to work only since recently,
even without quotation.

