http://searchengineland.com/faq-all-about-the-new-google-rankbrain-algorithm-234440
What’s The Name Of Google’s Search Algorithm?
Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm.
Machine learning is where a computer teaches itself how to do something, rather than being taught by humans or following detailed programming.
RankBrain is part of Google’s overall search “algorithm,” a computer program that’s used to sort through the billions of pages it knows about and find the ones deemed most relevant for particular queries.
What’s The Name Of Google’s Search Algorithm?
Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm.
Hummingbird also contains other parts with names familiar to those in the SEO space, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results, Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement.
PageRank is part of the overall Hummingbird algorithm that covers a specific way of giving pages credit based on the links from other pages pointing at them.
Google has fairly consistently spoken of having more than 200 major ranking signals that are evaluated that, in turn, might have up to 10,000 variations or sub-signals. It more typically just says “hundreds” of factors, as it did in yesterday’s Bloomberg article.
If you want a more visual guide to ranking signals, see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors.
I gather RankBrain is mainly used as a way to interpret the searches that people submit to find pages that might not have the exact words that were searched for.
The Knowledge Graph, launched in 2012, was a way that Google grew even smarter about connections between words.
The Knowledge Graph is a database of facts about things in the world and the relationships between them.
As Google told us, it can see patterns between seemingly unconnected complex searches to understand how they’re actually similar to each other. This learning, in turn, allows it to better understand future complex searches and whether they’re related to particular topics. Most important, from what Google told us, it can then associate these groups of searches with results that it thinks searchers will like the most.
Imagine that RankBrain is connecting that original long and complicated query to this much shorter one, which is probably more commonly done. It understands that they are very similar. As a result, Google can leverage all it knows about getting answers for the more common query to help improve what it provides for the uncommon one.
