Good afternoon/evening from beautiful Seattle, where the first day of our sold-out SMX Industry Email List Advanced conference concludes with the traditional Google keynote conversation. Tonight, our founding editor, Danny Sullivan, will speak for about an hour with Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Industry Email List Analyst at Google. We expect them to cover many recent SEO topics, such as RankBrain and keyword-based top-level domains, as well as some long-standing industry concerns like the Penguin algorithm and more. Again. The conversation is due to start around 5:00 PM PT, so be sure to come back then and refresh this article page for our live blog coverage. Alright, we're about to start. As always,

And I will also try to insert good tweets from our audience. Follow us Industry Email List as we go! DS: I thought we would start with something simple, so Industry Email List could you explain everything about RankBrain to us. (Laughs) Seriously, is that really a ranking factor? GI: If it's easy, I'm in trouble. I'll stick with what we said - basically it's a ranking factor. This is part of machine learning. (Ask anyone who knows what machine learning is.) It's something that tries to identify patterns and bucket data. It looks at data on previous searches, and based on what worked well for those searches,

It will try to predict what will work best for a given query. This works Industry Email List best for long-tail queries and queries we've never seen. An example might be "Can I beat Mario Bros without using a walkthrough." Without RankBrain, we give interesting results that do not meet my needs. But with RankBrain we can give results that answer my question. RankBrain will better understand which results work for queries. He Industry Email List will understand that some stop words should not be deleted. Sometimes the word “with” is dropped from a query, but RankBrain will understand that we need to keep it. Machine learning attempts to identify patterns and cluster data #