What is RankBrain and How does it Work? By Eric Enge

#SMX #22A @stonetemple

Based on a Study of 500,000 Search Queries

What is RankBrain and How Does it

Work?

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Example Title Slide:

Although this is a template, these slides have been created as examples to show you what’s possible within the template. PLEASE DELETE ALL EXAMPLE SLIDES AND NOTES BEFORE CREATING OR IMPORTING YOUR OWN DECK. YOU MUST USE THE SMX FOOTER ON YOUR TITLE SLIDE! The template works best if you use it to create a presentation from scratch. However, this blank layout offers you flexibility to insert your own slides above the SMX footer. You must use this footer at on almost all of your slides. If a screenshot overlaps the footer on occasion, that’s fine – but do your best to crop appropriately! Before you do anything else, here’s how to replace “#XXa” in the footer with your session’s specific hashtag. In PowerPoint, Select VIEW>SLIDE MASTER to edit SLIDE #1 to include it on all slides of your presentation. Also add your @twitterhandle (or @companyhandle if you prefer). Ask your session coordinator for the session’s specific hashtag! This template is high-‐resolution 16:9. DO NOT change it to 4:3. Also note that if you import a 4:3 presentation into 16:9 you may encounter display issues. The template uses Century Gothic & Corbel as default fonts. Arial is a secondary font that may appear. Note that older versions of PowerPoint may not have these as an option; change to Arial or other standard sans-‐serif-‐font. When inserting text, you *MUST* use only standard fonts. We cannot guarantee event laptops will have specialty fonts installed, nor can we do so onsite. Powerpoints with animations may not translate well to pdf/slideshare format – you may also submit a 2nd version / scrubbed deck more appropriate for posting online by SMX production staff.


Who Am I?

Columnist & Contributor

CEO & Founder

60+ person Digital Marke3ng and SEO agency

Lead Co-‐Author


I had Brain Surgery in 2003


Nope – Didn’t Get a USB Slot Installed


Enter RankBrain


Bloomberg Broke the News in

October 2015


(Rankbrain) interprets language, interprets your queries, in a way that has some of the gut feeling and guessability of people”

Notable Quote From the Video


Some Basic Language Analysis

Concepts


Basic Concept: Stop Words


Query That Doesn’t Work Well With Stop

Words


“The” and “Office” are capitalized


Another Example of Frequence of Word Usage

About 5 Uses in Every 330,000

Words


Sometimes this word refers to a

brand


The bags xxx xxxx xx Coach xxx xx x xxxxxxx xxxxx xx handbags.

Capitalized in the middle of a sentence

Mentioned on a page that discusses beads

and handbags

Mentioned on a page that discusses bags and

handbags

Taking a Deeper Look at “Coach”


“Yeah -‐-‐ being able to represent strings of text in very high-‐dimensional space and "see" how they relate to one another.”

Google Spokesperson’s Answer to a Question I Asked About RankBrain


What Does High Dimensional Vector

Space Mean?


Convert Phrases to Tokens


Notice Patterns in Language Usage


Notice Patterns in Language Usage

The •  Classic stop word •  But in some cases critical to phrase meaning

•  e.g. “The Office”

Graphic •  Could relate to violence

•  Could relate to language

•  Could relate to design

•  Meaning determined by context

Without •  Negatives traditionally ignored by Google

•  But in some cases critical to meaning of page


Example Queries Cited by Google


What is the label of a consumer at the highest level of a food chain?

“Name” To eat, not

to buy

“The” “Top”


Can You Get 100% Score on Super Mario Without Walkthrough?

Negatives


“Our old query parsers actually ignored the ‘without’ part.

RankBrain did an amazing job of catching that and instructing our retrieval systems to get the

right results”

Gary Illyes in February 11th Virtual Keynote


We Did a Study


Built a DB of 500K queries

from Google and Bing Suggest


June/July 2015 Google Result January 2016 Google Result

Pulled Results from Google on Two Different Dates


Search for Queries That Google Misunderstood


Verify That There is a Valid Search Result

We think the user meant this, but we can’t be

sure

Original query


Google didn’t directly

answer this, but not really a language

issue


Aggregate Results


How Did The Results Improve?


Why Are PDFs So Weak?

July 2015 Answer


Now Relates “Weak” to Security

January 2016

Answer


Where is Celtics Bench?

July 2015 Answer


Now Applies Meaning of “Where is” Better

January 2016

Answer


Who is Abs?

July 2015 Answer


User Was Out of Date on Name Spelling Change

January 2016

Answer

More Weight on “Who is”


What is Rare Blood Type?

June 2015 Answer


Understands User is Looking for Examples

January 2016

Answer


Who is Asking Teachers to Take a 20 Pay Cut?

July 2015 Answer


Understands that “20” is “20%”

January 2016

Answer


Youtube plus

July 2015 Answer


Google Connected YouTube and Plus as a Name

January 2016

Answer


Ex: “YouTube Plus”

Ex: “weak”

Ex: “convert glory into an adjective”

Ex: “convert into million dollars”

Types of Improvements


Specific Types of Improvements


Impact On SEO


Well, Nothing,

More or Less


More Obscure Phrases May Bring Up Your Page

Yes, You Still need to do KW research

You Can Increase Your Emphasis on Truly Natural Language

Summary of Key SEO Implications


SEE YOU AT THE NEXT #SMX

THANK YOU!

What is RankBrain and How does it Work? By Eric Enge

Marketing

Transcript of What is RankBrain and How does it Work? By Eric Enge