Posted by Dr-Pete
Summary: RankBrain represents a more advanced way of measuring relevance, built on teaching machines to discover the relationships between words. How should RankBrain change our approach to SEO and specifically to keyword research?
This story starts long before RankBrain, but the action really kicked in around May of 2013, when Google announced conversational search for desktop. At the time, voice search on desktop may have seemed like a gimmick, but in hindsight it was a signal that Google was taking natural language search seriously. Just a few months later the Hummingbird update rewrote Google's core engine, and much of that rewrite was dedicated to dealing with natural language searches.
Why should you care about voice? For most sites, voice is still a relatively small percentage of searches, and you've got other priorities. Here's the problem, illustrated by the most simplistic Google algorithm diagram I've ever created...
If there were two algorithms – one for text search and one for voice search – then, yes, maybe you could drag your feet. The reality, though, is that both text and voice search are powered by the same core algorithm. Every single change Google has made to adapt to natural language searches impacts every search, regardless of the source. Voice has already changed the search landscape irreversibly.
Natural language in action
You may be skeptical, and that's understandable. So, let's take a look at what Google is capable of, right now, in 2016. Let's say you wanted to find the height of Seattle's iconic Space Needle. As a seasoned searcher, you might try something short and sweet, like this...
"Space Needle height"
Google understands this question well enough to attach it to the corresponding Knowledge Graph entity and return the following:
The corresponding organic results appropriately match the informational query and are about what we've come to expect. Google serves this search reasonably well.
"What is the height of the Space Needle?"
Let's try to shake off our short-form addiction and try a natural language version of the same search. I won't repeat the screenshot, because it's very similar, as are the organic results. In 2016, Google understands that these two searches are essentially the same.
"How tall is the Seattle Space Needle in meters?"
Let's try another variant, switching the "What" question for a "How" question, adding a location, and giving it a metric twist. Here's what we get back:
Google understands the question and returns the proper units. While the organic results vary a bit on this one, reflecting the form of the question, the matches remain solid. Natural language search has come a long way.
Build great concepts!
This all may be a bit alarming, from a keyword research perspective. Natural language searches represent potentially thousands of variants of even the simplest queries. How can we possibly operate on this scale as search marketers?
The popular notion is that we should stop targeting keywords and start targeting concepts. This approach has a certain logic. The searches above share a general notion of "tallness," which might look something like this:
"Tall" and "height" are fairly synonymous, words like "size" and "big" are highly related, and units like "feet" and "meters" round out this concept. In theory, this makes perfect sense.
In practice, the advice to target concepts is a bit too much like saying "build great content." It's a good goal, in theory, but it's simply not actionable. How do we build great concepts? We all intuitively understand what a concept is, but how does this translate into specific search marketing tactics?
There's an even bigger problem, and I can illustrate it with one box:
Ok, one box, a logo, and two buttons. At the end of the day, you can't type a concept. Search users, whether they're typing or speaking, have to put words into that box. So, how do concepts, which we all agree exist and are useful, translate into keywords, which I hope we can all agree are still unavoidably necessary?
Language in action, part 2
We need to take a side path on this journey for a moment. Part of rethinking keyword research is understanding that we're no longer bound by an exact-match world. This isn't a bad situation to be in, just a complex one. I'd like to tell a story with examples, showing just how far Google has come in understanding the ways that different keywords relate to each other...
Plurals ("scarf" & "proxies")
While we all know the dangers of keyword stuffing, it originated out of a certain necessity. Search engines simply weren't capable of equating even simple terms, like plurals. Those days are long behind us. Google understands, for example, that a search for "scarf" should also return results for "scarves":
In these examples, I'll be using Google's own highlighting (the bold text; I've added the green boxes) to show where Google seems to understand equivalence or related concepts. Of course, Google's core relevance engine and highlighting engine are not exactly the same, but I think it's safe to say that the latter is a useful window into the former.
Google is also fully capable of understanding the reverse. Let's say, for example, that a "friend" of mine wants to buy proxy IPs. He might search for "proxies":
Google can easily understand even irregular plurals in both directions.
Stemming ("ballroom dancer")
Plurals are relatively easy. Let's step it up a little. Another frequent problem in search is dealing with stemming, which relates to root words and the forms they can take, such as "run" vs. "running." Here's a sample search for "ballroom dancer":
Google is perfectly capable of equating "dancer" to other forms of the word, including "dances," "dance," and "dancing." Once again, keyword stuffing is at best outdated thinking.
Abbreviations ("Dr. Who")
Can Google recognize common abbreviations? Let's try a search for our second-favorite doctor (hint, hint, wink), "Dr. Who":
Google easily makes the connection between "Dr." and "Doctor." Interestingly, none of the organic titles or snippets I see on page one contain the word "Dr."
Acronyms ("SNL skits" & "TARDIS")
How about acronyms? Here's a search for "SNL skits":
Google has no problem interpreting "SNL" as equivalent to "Saturday Night Live." Interestingly, they also understand that "skits" is synonymous with "sketches." What if we spell out an acronym that isn't usually spelled out, such as "Time And Relative Dimension In Space"?
Here, Google is happy to tell us "Hey, nerd, just say 'TARDIS' like everyone else." The six-letter acronym is interchangeable with even the much longer search string.
Acronyms+ ("NJ DMV")
This is where things get interesting. Here's a search for "NJ DMV." Look closely:
Not surprisingly, Google understands that "NJ" equals "New Jersey." There's a problem with this search, though – New Jersey doesn't call their motor vehicle office the DMV, they call it the MVC (Motor Vehicle Commission). Google understands not only how to expand an acronym, but that the acronyms DMV and MVC are conceptually equivalent.
Synonyms ("discount airfare")
The flip-side of no longer being confined to exact-match keywords is that you might just be finding yourself faced with a lot more competition for any given keyword. Let's look at a competitive, commercial query, such as "discount airfare":
Here, "discount airfare" gets matched to "airfare deals," "discount tickets," and "cheapest flights," with even more variations on the rest of page one.
Synonyms+ ("upscale department stores")
Wait, it gets worse. Google can go beyond traditional synonyms. Consider this search for "upscale department stores" (run from my home-base in the Chicago suburbs):
Answers ("Doctor Who villains")
We've moved from simply synonyms to a world of answers. Here's another example, a search for "Doctor Who villains":
It's a parlor trick to tell you that "villains" is synonymous with "monsters" and "enemies." What you really want to know is that Doctor Who's rogue's gallery includes Daleks, Cybermen, and Weeping Angels. Google can make this connection.
These aren't just exceptions
It's easy to cherry-pick examples, but are these edge cases or the new normal? I ran an analysis on 10,000 keywords (page one only) and found that only 57% of results had the search phrase in both the title and snippet. I used a pretty forgiving match (allowing for plurals, for example) and the keyword set in question is mostly shorter terms, not long-tail queries. I also allowed the terms to occur in any order. Keep in mind, too, that display snippets aren't always META descriptions – they're chosen by Google to be good matches.
All of this is to say that, even with a fairly forgiving methodology and a loose definition of a "match," just over half of page-one results in my data set matched the search query. The examples above are not outliers – they are our immediate, unavoidable SEO future.
The Algorithm is learning
This deep into the article, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with RankBrain. There's been a lot of speculation around RankBrain, and so I'm going to do my best to work from the facts as we understand them. You're going to need some essential background information...
What, exactly, is deep learning?
First, the one thing we all seem to be able to agree on is that RankBrain uses machine learning, thus the "brain" part. Specifically, RankBrain uses "deep learning." So, what is deep learning? According to Wikipedia:
Deep learning is a branch of machine learning based on a set of algorithms that attempt to model high-level abstractions in data by using a deep graph with multiple processing layers, composed of multiple linear and non-linear transformations.
Crystal clear, right? To understand deep learning and the state of modern machine learning, you have to understand neural networks. Let's start with a simple neural network, the kind that were popular in the early 1990s:
Neural networks were built on a basic understanding of the human brain as a system of "nodes" (neurons) and connections between those nodes. At scale, the human brain is capable of learning incredibly complex ideas using this system of nodes and connections.
So, how do we put this model to work? Let's start with what's known as "supervised learning." In a neural network like this, we have a known set of inputs and a desired set of outputs. Given a certain X, we want to teach the system to return Y. We use these inputs and outputs to train the system, gradually weighting the connections. The hidden layer adds computational complexity, giving the machine enough connections to encode interesting data.
Training itself uses methods that are cousins of linear regression (at the risk of oversimplification). Over a large set of inputs and output, we want to minimize the error of our model. In some cases, we work backward from the output(s) back to the input(s), in much the same way you might work a difficult paper maze from the finish back to the start.
Why go to all this trouble? If we know the inputs and outputs (sticking just to supervised learning, to keep this simple), why don't we just have a lookup table? If X, then Y – simple. What happens when we get an input that isn't in the table? The system fails. The magic of neural networks is that, if the system is properly trained, it can return outputs for completely new inputs.
To make a very long story only medium-long, these simple neural networks were interesting playthings, but weren't capable of solving many complex problems. So, we put them aside. Then, the inevitable happened – computing power increased exponentially and got cheaper (thanks, Gordon Moore!). Specifically, we invented the GPU. You might think of the GPU as something built for gamers, but it is, in essence, a very powerful math machine.
At some point, simple neural networks scaled up massively, and I mean massively – on the order of 1,000,000X larger. These new machines were able to perform much more interesting tasks, and a new age of neural networks was born. These new machines required more complex methods, and thus, at the risk of oversimplifying a very complex topic, deep learning was born.
How does Google use deep learning?
Fortunately, we know a bit more about RankBrain. In Steven Levy's excellent article about Google's machine-learning ambitions, he quotes the following from Jeff Dean, head of the broader Google Brain group...
By early 2014, Google’s machine learning masters believed [Amit's approach] should change. “We had a series of discussions with the ranking team,” says Dean. “We said we should at least try this and see, is there any gain to be had.” The experiment his team had in mind turned out to be central to search: how well a document in the ranking matches a query (as measured by whether the user clicks on it). “We sort of just said, let’s try to compute this extra score from the neural net and see if that’s a useful score.”
Amit Singhal, the head of Google's Search team until early 2016, pioneered the heuristic approach – what we might call the "ranking factors." Machine learning (ML) advocates at Google eventually were able to convince the team to test ML in a ranking context. By all accounts, that experiment went very well and the score was indeed useful.
It's also worth noting that Amit, who was reported to be skeptical of using ML in organic search, left Google and was replaced by John Giannandrea, who was instrumental in many ML projects at Google. I won't speculate on Amit's motivations, but the shift in leadership to a strong ML advocate clearly implies that Google considered the RankBrain experiment a success.
Of course, it begs the question: How exactly are ML and deep learning in play in organic search? Google teaches a deep learning course on Udacity, and I was intrigued to find this screenshot in a quiz. The quiz asked how Google might use deep learning in rankings, and this was the answer:
When we train an ML model, the "classifier" is essentially the resulting decision machine. In this case, that classifier takes in a search term and web page as inputs and decides how relevant they are to each other.
Two things are worth nothing in this deceptively simple screenshot. First, ML is being used as a relevance engine. I think it's safe to say that the quiz is not entirely hypothetical. Second, notice the query and the matching page. The query is "Udacity deep learning", but the matching result title contains the related phrases "machine learning" and "supervised learning." This is starting to look like some of the examples we saw earlier.
Another resource we have is the original Bloomberg article about RankBrain, which is still one of the more comprehensive pieces on the subject. The article quotes senior Google research scientist Greg Corrado and makes the following very specific claim:
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.
Again, RankBrain is being called out as essentially a relevance engine, a machine for better understanding the similarities and relationships between words. What are these vectors the article mentions, though? In the general sense, vectors are a mathematical concept – a point in space with both direction and magnitude. Vectors are a way of encoding complex information.
Thankfully, we have another clue, from Google's public ML project, TensorFlow. One of Google's side projects is a library called Word2Vec that, as the name implies, uses ML to convert words into vectors. Traditional methods of encoding words for information retrieval can deal with simple problems like pluralization and stemming, but have little or no sense of relationships. Word2Vec and similar models are capable of learning relationships like the examples below (Source: Tensorflow.org, ©2016 Google):
Here, Word2Vec has learned that the relationship between man and woman is the same as the relationship between king and queen (encoded in the direction of the vector). Similarly, the relationship between the verb tense walking to walked is the same as the relationship between swimming and swam. More importantly, these rules didn't need to be specified. The machine learned them by studying large collections of real words in context.
Google's actual algorithms are almost certainly more complex than the publicly available Word2Vec library, and researchers have combined vector-based approaches with other approaches, such as the more familiar LDA (latent dirichlet allocation), but it seems very likely that an approach like this is in play in RankBrain.
RankBrain is NOT query translation
It's easy to mistakenly jump to the conclusion that RankBrain simply translates unfamiliar queries into more familiar ones, or long queries into short queries. This is not the case. RankBrain seems to operate in real-time and can compare multiple versions of a search phrase at once.
If I mistakenly type a search like "Benedict Crumblebatch," Google will tell me this:
In this case, Google has tried to interpret my intent and has replaced my query with what it thinks is a better version. This is query translation. In this case, all of the results match the translated query and it overrules my orig
source https://moz.com/blog/tactical-keyword-research-in-a-rankbrain-world
No comments:
Post a Comment