Google's 18th Birthday and AI
Artificial Intelligence Knows Your Chocolate Desires
As any chocoholic will gladly attest, the taste of chocolate is among the finer things in life. Some prefer the bittersweet flavor of dark chocolate, others like the velvety smooth and addictively sweet taste of milk chocolate. With so many kinds of chocolate, there’s something for everyone. Now, scientists and researchers are trying to create intelligent machines able to discover your chocolate desires before you do.
Artificial Intelligence in a Nutshell
How is this possible? Artificial Intelligence (AI), the intelligence displayed by machines, is not a topic of science fiction anymore. Thanks to forward-thinking hi-tech companies like Google, computers can now learn without being programmed—just like small children intuitively learn new things simply by observing the world around them. The goal is to create programs that can automatically teach themselves new things, becoming smarter and smarter over time.
The work done by Google can be traced back to Shane Legg, Demis Hassabis, and Mustafa Suleyman, who founded the British artificial intelligence company DeepMind Technologies Limited in 2010. Google acquired the company in 2014, and with this acquisition, Google became the leader in this field of AI.
Google used DeepMind’s technology capable of mimicking the short-term memory of the human brain, called Neural Turing Machine, as a basis for RankBrain, which is a machine-learning AI system that helps the company deliver accurate search results.
Learning About Your Chocolate Desires
RankBrain is an important part of Google’s search algorithm. It uses mathematical processes and advanced understanding of language semantics to learn how and why people search. With RankBrain, Google can understand your search history and use this knowledge to offer highly accurate search results. What RankBrain does is a type of machine learning, a subfield of computer science that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence.
Whenever RankBrain comes across a word or a phrase that it does not know, the machine tries to guess what words or phrases may have the similar meaning and filters the results accordingly. A search query like “really yummy organic dark chocolate” is a simple understandable search for you, but for a computer, it is a very complex task. Even though no one knows how exactly RankBrain does what it does, many experts in the field of information technology are of the opinion that RankBrain interprets users’ searches to find relevant pages based on previous queries and interests of other users with similar taste.
In practice, when you type in a phrase like “healthy chocolate,” Google offers you pages of companies that sell organic dark chocolate, like us, Santa Barbara Chocolate. But it ranks the pages of the chocolate companies that most closely match that search query based on what RankBrain has learned through experience, such as real-life testimonials, social media company history, etc.
So, RankBrain is, indeed, a big deal. It has made the web much easier to navigate, by giving everyone results that correspond to tastes and preferences. In doing so, Google is making it more likely that your online purchases will make you happy and satisfied.
Conclusion
All these technological advancements help those who use Google get relevant information and find the best product from the best supplier. They also help genuine brands like us, Santa Barbara Chocolate, reach customers like you. This is where the established and traditional business model of chocolate meets some of the most advanced technologies. And it all happens in a seamless, easy way, making sure you get the chocolate you want.