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What is Google Bert Update? What you need to know about it?

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What is Google Bert update?

In simple words, we can say that Bert is the biggest change that has occurred to Google’s algorithm in the past 5 years. This change will affect at least one in every 10 search queries. With the Google BERT Update, Google aims to enhance the understanding of complex long-tail search queries and present more appropriate search results. By using Natural Language Processing, Google has considerably developed its ability to understand the grammatical context of search terms.

What does BERT mean?

The acronym, ‘BERT,’ stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and relates to an algorithm model that is structured on neural networks. With the guidance of Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine systems strive to evaluate the complexity of human language. BERT has the leading deeply bidirectional language representation. 

The difference between unidirectional and bidirectional contextual descriptions can be resolved with the following example. The word “bank” would have the equivalent context-free representation in “bank account” and “bank of the river.” Contextual models preferably generate a representation of each word that is based on the previous words in the sentence. For example, in the sentence “I accessed the bank account,” a unidirectional contextual model would describe “bank” based on “I accessed the” and not “account.” However, BERT represents “bank” using both its previous and next context, “I accessed the” and “account”, beginning from the very bottom of a deep neural network, making it strongly bidirectional.

You can find detailed documentation of BERT on Google’s AI blog.

Or in other terms, Google uses BERT to try to adequately surmise the context of a search query and to more precisely interpret the meaning of the individual words. This finding is formed on mathematical models called Transformers: These analyze a word in connection to all the other words in the sentence or in the case of Google we can say the search query, rather than simply looking at the meaning of words in isolation. This is particularly useful when describing the meaning of prepositions and the position of different words within a search query as mentioned above.

For many years now, Google has been operating on neural networks that can rightly respond to new search queries and develop the interpretation of content. Those Algorithms are briefed below.

Hummingbird: In 2013, Hummingbird was incorporated and it made it possible to better interpret entire search queries, preferably than just searching for the individual words in a query.

RankBrain: In 2015, RankBrain became part of Google’s algorithm and made it possible to process search terms with multiple meanings, or contrarily complex queries that go beyond the normal long-tail search. 

Which search queries are affected by BERT?

BERT’s influence concerns long-tail search queries. BERT changes the understanding of the context for longer queries that are entered into the search bar as a question or even a group of words.

On their blog, Google presented a few examples of search queries that BERT helps to assume are more satisfying and for which the search engine is now providing more relevant results.

Before Bert, a query like “2019 Brazil traveler to the USA needs a visa” was interpreted as a US citizen would like to travel to Brazil. But after Bert, the meaning of the word “to” and its connection to other words were understood perfectly. The word “to” plays an integral role in the meaning of the sentence. We are actually dealing with the meaning 'someone from Brazil who wants to travel to the USA' – not the other way around. The new BERT model makes it reasonable for Google to perfectly understand this difference and provide results that match the true search intent.

What can SEOs and webmasters do?

There is no simple response to how to respond to BERT. There aren’t any simple tactics that you can use to quickly make your website rank better or to recover losses. Instead, it is significant to bear in mind that you want to write your content and build your websites not only for algorithms but for people: for your possible users and customers who will be visiting and associating with your website.

Hope this article helped you get a better understanding of Google Bert algorithm. If you are looking for support with the search engine optimization of your website, you can get more information and reports from our SEO experts at iROID Technologies.