Google as an AI first company, a while ago, now, Google announced that it would become an AI first company. While that may sound like meaningless marketing babble, the truth is that this determination actually has huge potential repercussions for marketers, businesses and SEO. Firstly, what does Google mean by this? Meet the new smarter Google, you might think of Google as a search first company, the first product that Google provided was a search engine, and that is still what most of us associate with the company. Traditionally, Google's search engine did not work much like an AI. Rather search worked by attempting to match search terms with the content and an article.
This is why the advice for SEO is was to insert lots of key phrases into their articles so that Google spiders could read that content and quickly identify that it would be a good match for what the person was searching for. As we all know, this didn't work out perfectly for Google. Lots of unscrupulous marketers abuse the system by inserting online Hundreds of search terms into every article, which in turn meant that content Google would show to the user would be garbled and unreadable. That's why over time, Google has begun to work more and more like an AI. Now, Google no longer attempts to look for exact keyword matches. Instead, Google tries to answer questions that you ask it.
It does this by trying to understand what the user is looking for, along with the context. And then to provide relevant answers through its search rankbrain. Google is able to do this through machine learning. Specifically, it uses a form of natural language processing, which Google refers to as rankbrain. rankbrain is at least partly responsible for helping Google to cope with phrases and words that it hasn't seen before. If rankbrain identifies a word it isn't familiar with, then it can guess what it might mean based on context and based on its usage elsewhere.
This helps Google to deal with unusual searches that it hasn't seen before, without simply matching search terms to content and articles. search queries are turned into Word vectors called distributed representation. These are words and phrases that are close to each other in meaning and context. rankbrain will then try to map the query into words it understands or clusters of similar words. From there. It insinuates with the searcher actually means and is looking for, and provides results on that basis.
Rankbrain also understands the relationship between words and the way that they work together. At one point, joining words such as the or end were ignored by Google. Now Google understands the importance of these phrases and the way in which they impact on the intent of the user. Like all the best machine learning algorithms rankbrain attempts to improve over time and adapt to users. It can see which results get clicked the most and thereby know when it is doing well and when it is getting things wrong. As such, it is able to improve search results for any given keyword quickly through algorithmic testing, which is helping to weed out low quality content that attempts to game the system right brain works using a tensor processing unit TPU, which is an AI specific piece of hardware stored in Google's data centers.
This is a specific chip that is better able to handle the specific challenges of machine learning tasks. Google's further plans. Over the past few years, Google may have seemingly diversified now make smartphones and now make self driving cars. And it now makes apps like Google lense. But at the heart of all these initiatives is some form of AI or machine learning. Google lens uses machine learning to identify objects in a scene and allow users to that way search the real world around them.
Self driving cars, of course, are highly reliant of various forms of AI, and the Google Pixel phones. Arguably, their main focus is putting google assistant in everyone's pockets. And this is the real clue as to what Google is up to. Google Assistant is an AI and virtual assistant that users can use to get weather reports, to book taxis to play music and much more. Google Assistant uses account combination of machine learning to detect human language for example, and AI in order to provide useful results and speak in a natural manner. Google Assistant is closely integrated with Google search, you can ask Google Assistant a question like who started Iron Man, and it will give you a natural answer.
It does this by first using machine learning to turn your speech into a string, then by using Google search in order to look up useful answers, which involves machine learning in the form of rankbrain. Then by using narrow AI to extract the most useful answers from the best webpages, and then by using another form of narrow AI to provide the response in a natural sounding manner, which is designed to appear like general AI. Much of this is carried out not on the device that you're speaking to, but on Google's TPU located in the cloud. What does all this mean for marketers? So what does all this mean for marketers? Simple, it means that Google wants to be able to understand your content and extract the most useful information.
No longer wants you to use rigid keywords and it wants you to prepare for a more voice driven form of search. Google is betting big on AI and machine learning. It believes that in the future AI assistants will be huge and it wants google assistant to be number one. It envisages a future where we spend less time staring at our devices, and instead get the information we need by asking our phones or our Google homes. We'll speak naturally to these devices and they'll provide us with handy answers.