When Google introduced RankBrain as its third most important ranking signal, it caught many people off guard. It also frightened many SEO providers who were afraid they might have to completely overhaul their approach to optimization. And in many cases, they were right. Anyone who approached SEO from a perspective of trying to play off algorithms or guess how to best game the system is in trouble, because the system is no longer one with which we can keep up. RankBrain processes too much data too quickly for tricks to work. As artificial intelligence gains and increases its foothold in Search Engine Rankings, SEO webmasters will need to replace gamesmanship with quality.

Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database. The tech giant recently bought a leading artificial-intelligence research outlet, and it already has a robotics company on its books. So what if Google, or Facebook, or any of the companies we entrust our information to, wanted to use our search histories to create an artificially intelligent robot? Writer and director Alex Garland's new film, Ex Machina, looks at just that.

Online retailer eBay is attempting to extend its machine language capabilities beyond automatic language translation to e-commerce uses designed to make product searches more relevant. As automation improves, the company said one goal eliminating the search box. Meanwhile, development cycles have been reduced as more machine learning libraries are released to the open source community. "As machines get better at decoding natural language, commerce should become increasingly conversational -- eventually rendering the search box redundant," eBay CEO Devin Wenig noted recently. Wenig added that the pace of machine intelligence development has quickened over the last year.

Does the hotel search result you view on an online travel site a perfect match, just in the ballpark or even irrelevant? Six-year-old metasearch site Hipmunk quietly began offering desktop-site visitors the ability to enter natural language queries such as, "I want a cheap hotel on the Upper West Side" in a bid to make searching easier and to provide more relevant results. Travelers type natural language keywords into a search field and receive corresponding results with real-time availability and rates. The update isn't immediately obvious and requires some guesswork to locate as there's no banner or text indicating users can perform such a search. But various keyword searches we tried yielded relevant results.

Google is pulling another lever on its influential search engine in an effort to boost voter turnout in November's U.S. presidential election. Beginning Tuesday, Google will provide a summary box detailing state voting laws at the top of the search results whenever a user appears to be looking for that information. The breakdown will focus on the rules particular to the state where the search request originates unless a user asks for another location. Google is introducing the how-to-vote instructions a month after it unveiled a similar feature that explains how to register to vote in states across the U.S. The search giant said its campaign is driven by rabid public interest in the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. As of last week, it said, the volume of search requests tied to the election, the candidates and key campaign issues had more than quadrupled compared to a similar point in the 2012 presidential race.

They take many of the stresses and strains out of modern life. But smartphones, sat-navs and search engines could be messing with our minds. Scientists say that research is urgently needed into the long-term consequences of relying on gadgets rather than our brains. Studies on sat-nav use have found that while they helped motorists on their journey, they affected memory. The drivers remembered less about what they have seen along the way – and struggled to retrace the route when asked to drive it again without the aid of the sat-nav.

Google is pulling another lever on its influential search engine in an effort to boost voter turnout in November's U.S. presidential election. Beginning Tuesday, Google will provide a summary box detailing state voting laws at the top of the search results whenever a user appears to be looking for that information. The breakdown will focus on the rules particular to the state where the search request originates unless a user asks for another location. Google is introducing the how-to-vote instructions a month after it unveiled a similar feature that explains how to register to vote in states across the U.S. The search giant said its campaign is driven by rabid public interest in the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. As of last week, it said, the volume of search requests tied to the election, the candidates and key campaign issues had more than quadrupled compared to a similar point in the 2012 presidential race.

This image provided by Google shows on a mobile device a summary box detailing state voting laws at the top of the search results whenever a request indicates a user is looking for the information. Google begins the how to vote feature in Google Search on Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2016, pulling another lever on its influential search engine in an effort to boost voter turnout in November's U.S. presidential election.

Do machine-learning algorithms processing search engine queries bring on prejudice, discrimination and stereotyping in query results? Search results have been known to highlight these negative attributes in the past. Now researchers at Brazil's Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais suggest it could be true when it comes to female physical attractiveness in images available across the Web. The paper submitted to the International Conference on Social Informatics scheduled for publication analyzes how Google and Bing represent female beauty in their image search results, particularly when it comes to different age and racial groups. They then passed the more than 2,000 images through a program, which estimates subject age, race and gender with an estimated 90% accuracy.

It's possible using Dreambit, a face-swapping search engine that automatically analyzes any photo you upload and figures out how to crop it into images you search for. Your results incorporate your face, cropped and colorized and adapted to the images you receive. It sure does beat the heck out of doing it all manually. Created by computer vision researcher Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman at the University of Washington, Dreambit is an interesting tool that can and will be used for tons of silly applications, but the serious implications it has are infinite as well. In a press release, Shlizerman noted how the engine could be used in missing persons cases as it can adapt how victims in said cases can change their looks over time. Dreambit will be on display at SIGGRAPH next week, but unfortunately it's not available to the public just yet.