Google’s ‘search’ for artificial intelligence
Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of artificial intelligence, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation, and recently, search
When Google-parent Alphabet reported eyepopping earnings recently, its executives couldn’t stop talking up the company’s investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).
For any other company that would be a wonky distraction from its core business. At Google, the two are intertwined. Artificial intelligence sits at the extreme end of machine learning, which sees people create software that can learn about the world. Google has been one of the biggest corporate sponsors of AI, and has invested heavily in it for videos, speech, translation, and recently, search.
For the past few months, a ‘very large fraction’ of the millions of queries a second that people type into the company’s search engine have been interpreted by an artificial intelligence system, nicknamed RankBrain, said Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist with the company, outlining for the first time the emerging role of AI in search.
RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.
The system helps Google deal with the 15 per cent of queries a day it gets which its systems have never seen before, he said.
For example, it’s adept at dealing with ambiguous queries, like, “What’s the title of the consumer at the highest level of a food chain?” And RankBrain’s usage of AI means it works differently than the other technologies in the search engine.
“The other signals, they’re all based on discoveries and insights that people in information retrieval have had, but there’s no learning,” Corrado said.
Keeping an edge in search is critical to Google, and making its systems smarter and better able to deal with ambiguous queries is one of the ways it can keep a grip on timestarved users, who are now mostly searching using their mobile devices. “If you say Google people think of search,” Corrado said. neers, who spend their days crafting the algorithms that underpin the search software, were asked to eyeball some pages and guess which they thought Google’s search engine technology would rank on top. While the humans guessed correctly 70 per cent of the time, RankBrain had an 80 per cent success rate.
Typical Google users agree. In experiments, the company found that turning off this feature “would be as damaging to users as forgetting to serve half the pages on Wikipedia,” Corrado said.