BERT — Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is specially designed for understanding the Natural Language processing better, which follows on from RankBrain — It was the last change in Google’s search algorithm, announced five years ago.
How is BERT different from RankBrain?
When it comes to RankBrain, it was designed to handle tasks, including part of speech tagging, entity recognition, and question-answering. The company said that BERT can impact the searches by almost 10%. It also helps in understanding search queries better by comprehending the context behind a search. As a result, the users get relevant and accurate search engine results page (SERP).
Let’s understand how does BERT. works with the help of an example.
There are two phrases, “six to nine” and “a quarter to four.”In both the phrases, “to” give different meanings. A human mind could distinguish between both but search engines failed to find out the difference. But today, Google has BERT, which is designed to find the differences between such words and the users can have more accurate results.
What is Natural Language processing?
To understand the impact of BERT on the SERP, it is important to know what is Natural Language processing.
According to Google Natural Language processing is:
Google Cloud Natural Language reveals the structure and meaning of text through powerful pretrained machine learning models”
In quote simply, Natural Language processing is a branch of artificial intelligence, which handles tasks like linguistics. This helps computers to understand communication the way human minds do. Some of the changes made by Natural Language processing include chatbots, social listening tools and word suggestions on smartphones.
Is BERT a replacement to RankBrain?
Well, definitely not! BERT is not replacement to Rankbrain because RankBrain is not dead and it is still used for some queries. When it comes to BERT, it is the latest algorithm that helps Google understand the content and searches in natural language. Basically, BERT is an additive to the ranking system of Google.
The bottom line
Please remember, BERT cannot make sense of all queries to Google. In fact, it is said that BERT can help Google understands only 1 in 10 searches.