Most people wont notice, but, Google executives said, the new technology represents a leap forward in the companys ability to understand what people are asking for when they search.
For example, for the entry get medicine at pharmacy, Google will home in on the words medicine and pharmacy and look for pages related to those two keywords.
Starting today, the company is rolling out a new machine learningpowered language processing method called Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformers, or BERT for short.
Using BERT, Googles search engine now shows a 2002 article from the Department of Health and Human Services about how to have a friend or family member pick up the medicine on your behalf.
Pandu Nayak, Googles vice president of search, gave another example at a press event yesterday, using the query How old was Taylor Swift when Kanye went on stage? Before BERT, Google surfaced videos of the 2009 event during which the rapper interrupted the pop stars acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards.After BERT, Google presents as its first result a snippet from a BBC article, which states: A 19-year-old Swift had just defeated Beyonc to win Best Female Video for her country-pop teen anthem You Belong With Me.
While most people will probably not realize a new natural language processing technology is at work, behind the scenes, the change will most likely impact websites that rely on Google for traffic.
Nayak said he is confident that, in general, BERT will improve results for more complicated queries: Were playing a statistical game here.