Google rolled out a new update this week. It is not just any update: according to Google itself, this is the biggest Google update in more than 5 years. It is meant to understand complex search queries better. Every 10th search query is said to be affected.
BERT almost reminds you of Sesame Street. But BERT actually stands for “Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers“. According to Google’s own explanation, that means “models that process words in relation to all the other words in the sentence”. Until now, when a search query consisted of several words, Google processed the words one by one. That is set to change with the BERT update. An English-language example from Google is:
Until now, the two most important search terms “medication” and “pharmacy” were processed. Google inferred from that that someone was looking for local pharmacies. With BERT, Google now wants to be able to understand that this is actually a legal question and deliver the right results for that question.
So far, however, the new Google algorithm is only used for English-language searches. Google itself has not yet named a date for rolling the update out in Germany. BERT will presumably learn from the English-language search queries and thus become more intelligent. As soon as the algorithm is rolled out to other languages, it will work even better. The German SEO industry is already trembling and expects far-reaching changes for 2020.
