Google: Algorithm Updates

Welcome BERT: Google’s latest search algorithm to better understand natural language

BERT will impact 1 in 10 of all search queries. This is the biggest change in search since Google released RankBrain.

Barry Schwartz on October 25, 2019 at 3:01 am

Google is making the largest change to its search system since the company introduced RankBrain, almost five-years ago. The company said this will impact 1 in 10 queries in terms of changing the results that rank for those queries.

Rolling out. BERT started rolling out this week and will be fully live shortly. It is rolling out for English language queries now and will expand to other languages in the future.

Featured Snippets. This will also impact featured snippets. Google said BERT is being used globally, in all languages, on featured snippets.

What is BERT? It is Google’s neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training. BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

It was opened-sourced last year and written about in more detail on the Google AI blog. In short, BERT can help computers understand language a bit more like humans do.