Google’s BERT algorithm update brings organic search one step closer to understanding the relevance and intent behind its searchers’ queries. It is an acronym that stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Google has developed this open-source, natural-language technology to understand the relationship between all words in a search query better.
Google had previously processed the words in every search query from left to right that is in the order in which it encountered them. The BERT update applies bidirectional processing to determine the meaning behind the words in relation to each other. This is regardless of the order in which they’re used in the query.
However, this algorithm does not impact the niche edits. Users can click here to study about these niche edits and how they can help in ranking the businesses.
Earlier to the update Google would not have picked up on the importance of the preposition “to” in the search query “2019 Brazil traveler to USA needs a visa.” The search results thus listed information for travelers both to the United States and to Brazil. The new update will take into account the importance of the word “to,” thus the top results will now show information for travel to the U.S. from Brazil, as per the searcher’s request.
Google has stated that the BERT update will influence about 10% of the U.S. English search queries it processes. It will only apply to organic web search and featured snippets at this point. Clearly stating that it will not impact the other 90% of U.S. English organic search queries, also other organic search channels like news and image search. It will also not impact the paid search results, search results in other countries and the search results in other languages other than English.
