Google has announced the largest search engine update in five years. The company began to introduce a new algorithm based on artificial intelligence. The technology, called BERT, will allow the search engine to better understand users because it analyzes not individual words, but the entire query.
The previous algorithm tried to highlight the most important words in a user request, ignoring short or general ones. This allowed him to determine the main topic of the request but prevented it from understanding exactly what the user wants. Although the new algorithm has drawbacks compared to the previous one, the company calls its implementation “ the biggest leap forward in the past five years and one of the biggest leaps in the search history.”
The technology has already been tested in English-language search and has reduced the number of conversions to sites in the SERP, as users have begun to get the information they need faster. But search manager Ben Gomez assured the Financial Times that BERT will not have much impact on Google’s traffic. Instead, in his opinion, users will begin to ask more complex questions as the quality of answers improves.
FT notes that this is the first time that natural language processing technology has been introduced, which attracted the attention of scientists last year. Understanding language is one of the biggest challenges for artificial intelligence due to its variability. This is due to the fact that the meaning of words can change depending on who uses them in what context.
