One thing that we have learned over the years is that curiosity is the mother of creation. We humans, always want one or another thing to learn about. There are so many questions in our minds that we don’t find answers to. In search of these answers, we used to read books or consult our elders and friends. Many pieces of research and theories were not even available to the public. Then google happened, it understood the need for sharing information amongst the people and making them aware of the technologies we can play with.
Google search became an important part of our lives within a few days of its launch. There are times when we have to search for some alien subject and have no clue what exactly the keywords would be. We tend to search for our queries without laying emphasis on our grammar. As a result, google picks up the words it is familiar with and the results are quite unexpected.
Many algorithms have been changed with time and the world now knows the importance of keywords and grammar. The easiest way to find anything on google is to type the keywords for example, If you type a name of a song, or movie the entire results mentioning that song or movie will appear in front of us. This is known as the search result. Every business wants their page or website to be on the first page and hence do their best to rank in the top 5.
The above timeline shows the algorithms that Google has changed over the course of 5 years.
The current update BERT ( Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) is making a lot of hype and many myths have also started surrounding it. You may be thinking about what is this update and how it could affect your business and lives. Here we are to answer all the queries running in your mind.
What is BERT?
Before rolling out BERT a neutral network update was launched that helps in categorizing the same type of content, for example, all the scripts, images, videos, etc in their respective categories. This helped in managing the search results better. The search engines of google grab the information and the search pattern and stores the same. It then shows you the result that is best related to your query.
On October 21, 2019, BERT was rolled out and google claimed that it was one of the biggest technological leaps and the largest update in the last five years. It is believed to affect 10% of the search engine result and this is the reason people have started speculating its outcome.
BERT will read your sentence and then analyze it, for instance, if you search for “math practice books for adults” earlier google used to related math and practice books and give you the results based on it which helped in ranking the sites that were not useful or gave you the links that were of no use to you. But, with this update, it understood that the user wants to search for math books that are for higher classes and this eventually helps in giving the most accurate results. In other words, we can also, say that google results have moved from ‘relevancy’ to ‘accuracy’.
In another example: If you searched for ‘ Can you get medicine for someone pharmacy’ the results shown were more related to ‘medicine for pharmacy’ and the results shows you the websites where you can fill a prescription and the ways to do it. Now with the change in the technology, you can see that the accuracy has increased and BERT understood the prepositions too and gave you the result that answers your query about taking medicines on others’ prescriptions.
Google summarized the update in the following words:
“These improvements are oriented around improving language understanding, particularly for more natural language/conversational queries, as BERT is able to help Search better understand the nuance and context of words in Searches and better match those queries with helpful results.
Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”
ADVANTAGES OF BERT
Better Search Results: Since the BERT understands the prepositions and the context the results are now more accurate. The content meant for the query can accurately be given out to the users.
Improved Search in Local Languages: This algorithm will roll out not only for the English language but also for many of the local languages like Hindi, Portuguese and many more. You can now get the results for your query as a whole and not just the words.
Your Natural Language is Heard: No need to search in the keyword language to get better results. But, go with your natural flair of language and the algorithm will understand and give out the results you want.
A Major Update: It for sure is one of the major updates which is better than its predecessors. The search results are now more accurate and more than 10% of results are now affected by it.
Improve in Search Query: The results are for sure being affected but its a very major step in machine learning as the data could now be understood more precisely. Once, the machine learning understands your query based on your faulty grammar it can start interacting with you.
The latest Cloud TPUs are used for the first time to support the BERT update. Google is now planning on to make more major changes for a better machine learning system and to bring the world closer by giving them the exact information needed. We would like to inform you that one need not worry about their SEO rankings until and unless your results were based on wrong queries. Due to the earlier loopholes, the ranking was affected even if your articles had related words. Let’s wait for the next update which would again be a step ahead then BERT.