Google Updates Its Search Algorithm: Let's Discover BERT Together

Google has announced what will be the most important update in the last 5 years. It is called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and it uses a system for natural language processing. In short, Google's new algorithm will help machines understand what the words in a sentence mean, with all the nuances of the context in which they are used.

Yes, because today more and more users rely on devices based on artificial intelligence such as voice assistants, Google Home above all, and talk to them naturally and no longer in short search keywords (like a search made from a smartphone). The tone users adopt when searching online is conversational and full of prepositions such as "for" or "of", which matter enormously for the meaning of the sentence spoken: Google search will be able to understand the context of these words, with the aim of allowing a more natural search and returning search results that are ever more accurate and consistent with the user's query. The novelty will make online search more practical and simple, because the system will be able to understand the whole meaning of the sentence and no longer just the simple keyword.

It has been estimated that the new change will affect 10% of the answers provided by the search engine: if you think about it, that is an enormous change, given the immense number of searches made online!

For the moment the update is live only on Google in the United States, but over the coming months it will be released for other countries too, probably including Italy.

But what will all this mean in terms of SEO? We at NewVisibility, our web agency in Como, are already preparing, trying to work out the best strategy to apply the effects of Google BERT to the websites we build.