These AI-powered systems can understand your words, then translate those into search results.
Voice search and image search are newer search capabilities made possible by AI.ĪI technologies like NLP have gotten so advanced they can actually understand human voices in real-time, like when you use a Google Assistant. Nowadays, they've updated their algorithms and use AI to separate the high quality content from the low quality spam. Of course, this was damaging to search engines because the pages that were at the top of their results weren't necessarily the highest quality content. No matter the technique, they had one goal: game each search engine results page (SERP) they could. Quality controlīack in the day, certain SEO "specialists" beat the system with shady practices that we've come to know as "black hat SEO techniques." These include aggressive keyword stuffing, cloaking, invisible text the list goes on. That means BERT can understand the context of a search, not just the keywords in it. Using its pre-trained language model BERT, the company's search engine now understands complete sentences. Today, Google has taken understanding search queries a few giant leaps forward. Search Engine Journal also points out that Google search uses some of the same practices by optimizing search engine results based on recent previous queries, and allows users to conduct a search with nothing more than a photo (which uses another field of artificial intelligence). By creating these personalized search results, they've increased click through rate by about 10%. Yandex developers found that they could take all of their users' previous searches and use them to optimize future searches. A University of Washington study looked at Yandex, the world's fourth largest search engine, and noticed that it also has some advanced applications of NLP and machine learning. That's a textbook application of natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI dedicated to teaching computers to understand our written language.īoth Google and Microsoft are using NLP to understand their users. In other words, to serve you the right content, search engines need to understand what you're asking in the first place.
Search engines are computer applications, but they need to be able to understand human language in order to find users the information they're looking for.
While Google gives guidance about what matters to its algorithms, nobody outside the company has full visibility into how these algorithms make decisions. Together, these factors help Google's AI determine which pages to serve in response to your search query. These algorithms have many rules that prioritize different factors, from the types of keywords in your content to your site's user experience. Google (and other search engines) rely on complex search algorithms to determine how content gets ranked. The biggest way search engines use AI is to rank webpages, videos, and other content in search results. How do search engines use AI? Search rankings In fact, every search engine today is an AI-powered search engine. It does this by taking rules and learnings that humans taught it, then operating on its own to power your modern search engine. With tens of thousands of searches happening every second, AI is needed to understand queries, rank results, and filter content at scale in real-time. That's because search today is far too complex for a human-supervised machine to handle. It also makes it critical to how search engines function. That makes AI highly useful across different commercial applications, from smartphones to self-driving cars. Machine learning algorithms are able to actually learn on their own, without explicit human supervision or teaching or rules. With all the brilliant minds behind them, to what extent are search engines using artificial intelligence and machine learning? What is AI for search?Īrtificial intelligence is the process of making machines smart.
It's algorithms and a lot of ideas from a lot of brilliant people. Then, magically the search engine has scoured the entire internet to find the most relevant result. You pop onto your favorite one and type in a few keywords.