In today’s hangout, someone asked an inevitable Google RankBrain question, this time about whether Google’s RankBrain impacts other parts of the organic search, such as news and image results.

Is Rankbrain’s query processing used by organic results only, or are any parts shared with other widgets, e.g. images, Shopping/PLAs, etc?

While John’s answer isn’t exact on the specific question, he does offer some addition insights into RankBrain that weren’t previously confirmed by Google, namely that the toolset is there to be used by Google for various parts of the results.

I don’t know.  My guess would be here that this is still a fairly new technology.  In general at Google we try to reuse technology building blocks and use them in other places as well, so specifically around machine learning, that’s something where that toolset can be reused for various other products as well, so that could apply to different parts of search, that could apply to completely different products that have their own search or that don’t even use search at all that try to figure out what should we show in these category pages.

So in general the machine learning tool kit is something that we would use, just like any other tools within Google.

So while Mueller isn’t confirming RankBrain’s use in parts of the search results that are pulled in, such as images, news, or even ads, the potential is there for the various teams to take advantage of those machine learning building blocks to do so.