Bloomberg broke the news yesterday about Googles new "RankBrain" algorithm which is now (and has been for a little while) live in the search results.
The article is a bit of hype which will no doubt fuel the Skynet comparison from the 1980's Terminator films, but behind the hype it's quite an interesting development and something that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.
Rankbrain itself is a machine learning algorithm that starts the journey of artificial intelligence. Not quite self thinking robots, but an algorithm that can start to understand context in web pages and peoples search queries.
Search Engine Land have highlighted part of the Bloomberg article, a quote from senior research scientist Greg Corrado: "In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query".
What does it mean for small business websites?
It could mean quite a lot. We know the famous Google algorithm has reportedly hundreds of signals that decide if your web page about widgets should end up on page 1 or page 55, but this particular signal is the third most powerful. So it's worth paying attention.
How does RankBrain work?
Forgetting scifi and sticking with our humble web pages, you may be aware of something called semantic search or structured data. I've banged on about it quite a lot over the years, but it now looks like it has become more important. I suspect this is the key driver for RankBrain. I'm not Google, and Google aren't being very open about how it works, but with all the drive towards more ordered data, knowledge graphs, carousal results, I suspect this hinges around structured data.
Structured Data is a means to mark up areas of your web page and site to tell the like of Google what your page is about, and provide some all important context. I did a post explaining all about structured data a while ago which covers the basics:
Semantic Search Marketing & Structured Data what is it?
A Simplified example and demonstration
In a nut shell, taking something simple, such as our address on the bottom of this page. You can see it in the footer as:
Well Google actually see's it as structured data, or "mark up", with each address line marked up to explain what it is and how it fits in to bigger picture.
itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"© 2005-2015 Lowi Ltd T/A (this tells Google we are a business and what our name is)
itemprop="url" a href="http://www.mylocalservices.co.uk" (this tells Google our web address)
itemprop="name"My Local Services (the name we are known as)
itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" (this then tells Google that the following information is the postal address information of that business)
itemprop="streetAddress"Minerva Mill,
itemprop="addressLocality"Alcester
itemprop="addressRegion"Warwickshire,
itemprop="postalCode"B49 5ET,
itemprop="telephone"01789 761 364 (finally, Google now knows and understands our telephone number)
Losing you? Here is a visual representation.
Without any structured data for Google to read, how would it know our telephone number? Now to be fair Google has been getting smarter and smarter at extracting information from our web sites to answer users queries, but structured data makes it a 100% easier. We have told Google we are a company, who we are, our trading name, where we are and our phone number.
If I type in Google:
what is the telephone number of my local services
This is the response:
Now that was done "incognito" mode, or not logged in, so we didn't have any biased results, but for the search term My Local Services, Google knows exactly what our telephone number is, displaying it in a dedicated box at the top, as well as populating the knowledge panel on the right hand side with our building location and map listing. Remember this is for our generic trading name, not our actual legal business name, which you would expect to rank for.
Now that's just a very high level example, and the structured data tags shown above have been simplified with the correct html removed, to make them clearer (before anyone says typo!)
How could you use it?
Look a the possibilities. The way we search has changed, users expectations have grown over the years and the search queries they type in reflect that.
Imagine adding all sorts of structured data to your web pages, directly explaining to Google what your content is about, so it can show your web pages (or content) to users queries. A recent study suggested only 20% of web sites were utilising structured data. Google has been banging on about it for years, with easy mark up tools in your Web Master Tools, but few people have been really listening. This makes this area of search, which has become so much harder over recent years more accessible to people who are looking to push the boundaries.
I suspect with the RankBrain algorithm which will be no doubt hoovering up as much structured data as it can, will start to change things.
This post only scratches the surface of the possibilities. If you want to know more, one of the best places to learn, is a Google Group called Semantic Search Marketing.
If you want to learn about the correct way to implement structured data tags, then head over to schema.org a collaborative community with engineers from the likes of Google and Yahoo.
Article sources: Bloomeberg, Search Engine Land
So what are your thoughts? Does it all make sense, or does it sound like a load of complicated gibberish? Have you spotted an opportunity for your own website, or are you already utilising structured data?
If anyone has any questions I'll try and answer as best as I can, but I'm learning as we go along as well 
