The future of search, Artificial Intelligence, is here. It’s now.

Nicola Tilley explained this best in a she article produced on February 25, 2015.  Here’s a summary …

At the Tomorrow Technology Conference last year Google’s A.I. played a video game called Breakout (it’s kind of like Pong).  The object of the game is to knock bricks from a wall by hitting a ball against it.

After half an hour of play, the A.I. program is doing well.  It is trying to move its paddle toward the ball, apparently grasping the rudiments of the game. After another thirty minutes, two hundred rounds in, the A.I. has become a talented amateur: it misses the ball only every third or fourth time.

Then something happens. By the three hundredth game, the A.I. has stopped missing the ball. The A.I. uses four quick rebounds to drill a hole through the left-hand side of the wall above it. Then it executes a killer bank shot, driving the ball into the hole and through to the other side, where it ricochets back and forth, destroying the entire wall from within. Hours after encountering its first video game, and without any human coaching, the A.I. has not only become better than any human player but has also discovered a way to win that its creator never imagined.

Wow!  Pretty cool stuff right.  And it’s a part of our daily lives already.  I suspect Google has been applying A.I. to their algorithm long before they quietly announced it to the world.  It has been overshadowed by the ridiculously hyped news regarding mobile website search.  But I noticed.  And I am guessing that most good SEOs did as well.  The change in search has been less than subtle.  And it’s not because Google A.I. can now read and understand material; it’s because Google A.I. can learn material on the web.

Need proof?  Take a look at how Google Analytics has changed.  In January 2015 Google added query information to GA.  Only it’s not the old “keyword” data that they used to provide.  Watch your query information for a few months and you can see how Google is bringing more and more long-tail queries about your subject matter.  It’s learning your site.  It’s bringing an audience to your site because it’s learning about the people that are searching.  It’s the most complex video game on the planet!