14 DAY TRIAL // Google's new RankBrain AI engine is apparently more complicated than previously thought, and even some of Google's own staff don't know exactly how it's working, according to Paul Haahr, one of the company's top engineers working on the Search team.
Haahr made the statement at SMX West, a search marketing conference that took place in San Jose, California between March 1 and 3.
Speaking during the event's keynote, Haahr was answering questions about Google's search products in general when someone asked him about the company's latest addition, the RankBrain AI.
The engineer's answer, as Barry Schwartz, SERoundtable reporter, and many other conference attendants attested on Twitter, was that many of Google's own engineers don't quite fully understand how the new RankBrain algorithm works.
RankBrain has become an important piece of Google's search engine
RankBrain is an artificial intelligence system that Google started working on during the past years, under the supervision of top engineer John Giannandrea, an AI expert.
The system was announced in October 2015, but Google said that RankBrain had actually gone live months before, only it hadn't told anyone about it.
As Google explained, RankBrain is the company's third most important indicator, among hundreds of others, when it comes to ranking the search results that appear on your screen.
RankBrain works based on an artificial intelligence system that Google periodically retrains, and is said to have a so-called "gut feeling" when it comes to choosing the correct answers to your search queries.
Google to put more focus on AI-ranked search results
Apparently, this "gut feeling" is what most engineers don't understand. In a TV interview with Bloomberg, a Google engineer explained that RankBrain was specifically created for this purpose, to sort out tricky questions, but it became so good that it started being more and more of a valuable tool in deciding the final ranking of a query's search results.
RankBrain's success was even more obvious when Giannandrea was named the head of Google Search last month, after Amit Singhal, the previous head of Google's Search division for the past fifteen years, decided to retire.
Taking into account that Singhal made Google Search what it is today, giving the reigns to Giannandrea, an AI guy, shows the direction and the trust Google is putting into RankBrain, a system that some of its engineers openly admit to having no clue as to how it's working.
A very scary thought since AI is still in its incipient stages of implementation, only covering trivial Web services, and not nation-wide operations like the infamous Skynet in the "Terminator" movies. If this meager "search helper" is hard to understand, then AI is truly humanity's greatest danger, as Stephen Hawking had warned against a few years back.
Google understands how RankBrain works but not really what it is doing. @haahr #SMX — Jonah Stein (@Jonahstein) March 3, 2016
Google doesn't quite understand what RankBrain is doing says @haahr #smx — AJ Kohn (@ajkohn) March 3, 2016