PageRank, for example, can't be the whole search algorithm since it's not even query-dependent. It would just put the same most authoritative document at the top for every query.
Similiarly, RankBrain doesn't sound like it could be the whole algorithm. It sounds like it is just a text understanding model (which wouldn't know anything about e.g. the global reputation of the document, the popularity of the document, etc.). In fact, the article explicitly confirms this:
>RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query, he said.
I'd guess some kind of composite content quality signal and some kind of composite popularity signal sit at #1 and #2.
[1] - I don't have any insider knowledge about how Google works, but this article suggests that they were getting ready to switch from a hand-tuned model to a machine learned one in 2008: http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky/2008/05/are-human-experts...
Even if I search for a very specific query, Google will just only give me results ignoring several parts of my query, and at best one or two about my actual query.
Even duckduckgo manages to give better results often at this point.
EDIT: Just found verbatim search, at least that gives almost equal results as duckduckgo. Still not as good, but it’s okay.
Even Verbatim search will happily lop-off search words.
Tonight I was searching for "raf ballykelly vulcan" and after a few puzzling results realised that Ballykelly had been discarded. Since it was the airfield in question the results were therefore useless.
And with Google Maps being already worse than Bing, OSM, or even fucking Apple Maps, all Google products I actively used are now useless for me.
It should not be hard to convert a query into a regex for content, title and URL and apply it on the index.
It’s incredibly frustrating, but if I, by accident, use Google again and see the issue, I’ll tell you.
Then give it a keyword, I use "vg" for "Verbatim Google".
Then in the Navbar I can type "vg foo bar", which will search "foo bar" verbatim. Closest thing to permanent once you get used to using keywords ( which are awesome by the way :D )
Specifically, the url you want to use is: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1
Good tip. I use a similar one with site:en.wikipedia.com and I'm Feeling Lucky to quickly jump to wikipedia articles.
Does RankBrain have an intermediate form which shows its interpretation of the query? Wolfram Alpha does, and will show an explanation of how it interpreted the query. (It has to, because it may give you an numeric answer). It would be useful for Google to tell you what question they think you are asking.
PageRank was a simple, stupid algorithm that produced incredibly smart results. The exact kind of thing that sees widespread deployment with a startup. The description of this AI sounds more like an AI tool in general. It would've been much harder for Google to have started with this. The computers alone would've been prohibitive. So, we can call it an AI.