Google MUM update: What can SEOs expect in the future?

The introduction of MUM represents the next major paradigm shift for Google search after Hummingbird, Rankbrain and BERT. While the previous innovations based on machine learning are based on several trained models for different tasks, the goal at MUM is to use only one model for all tasks related to indexing, information retrieval and ranking.

That streamlining of machine learning models has a host of benefits for search performance, but before you can fully appreciate what a major change MUM represents, you must first understand what we’re dealing with here.

What is MUM?

MUM?is short for?Multitask Unified Model?and is a new technology for Google search first introduced in?May 2021.?

At the?Search On 21?in fall 2021, the forthcoming rollout was announced, and the technology was described in more detail. MUM works with artificial intelligence or natural language understanding and processing and answers complex search queries with multimodal data.

MUM is multilingual and processes information from different media formats to answer questions. In addition to text, MUM also understands images, video and audio files.

How does MUM work?

In May 2021, Google introduced MUM as a 1000 times more powerful evolution of BERT. Both technologies are based on natural language processing. But MUM is about more than just natural language processing.

MUM combines several technologies to make?Google searches?even more semantic and context-based to improve the user experience. With MUM, Google wants to answer complex search queries for which a normal SERP snippet is not sufficient.

The tasks to be undertaken by MUM were presented as follows:

• MUM is to provide a deep understanding of world knowledge.
• MUM is to be trained in up to 75 languages simultaneously to understand them. With previous methods, each language was trained in its own language model.
• MUM should be able to understand the information in addition to text, images, audio and videos.

The following can be deduced from these statements by Google:

• Google uses MUM to further expand the semantic databases such as the Knowledge Graph and to come closer to the goal of a complete knowledge database.
• With MUM, Google wants to make the international search even better to bring all indices and search instances worldwide to a similar qualitative level, thus guaranteeing the user experience in every country and every language on the planet at the same high level and also working more efficiently, in terms of their own resources.
• Probably the most exciting development for SEOs is that MUM wants to access all media formats to collect information (data mining), understand it and process it in the search results in such a way that the search intention is optimally served and the user experience with the Google search is very high.
• In other words, in addition to the trillions of text-based content, Google also has access to all information from all media formats in the Google systems to increase the (entity) index. As a result, even more information on recorded entities can be generated. Information from text, videos, audio and images can be presented in the SERPs even better for a search query.