Last week Google revealed it has been using RankBrain, a machine learning process, to help return results for a large number of search queries. Google began a slow, quiet rollout of the update in early 2015, and RankBrain has been completely live and in use for searches globally for the past several months.

With the addition of RankBrain to its algorithm, Google is attempting to better predict what information people are searching for by using past queries to learn...