Google Names a New Algorithm after a Sesame Street Character

According to Pandu Nayak, Google’s objective is to understand language and the meaning begin searches. This is why last year, November 2018, Google unveiled a natural language processing (NLP) initiative . 

Over the past year, researchers at Google’s AI lab, Stanford, Microsoft and the Google Brain initiative have been studying new ways to “understand search queries” and render results that match the intent of the searcher. After writing the natural language algorithm and through extensive testing, Google is rolling out the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm.

Based on my additional research, Google's search algorithm now understands the relationship between words both from left to right and from right to left. For example, a real estate agency might use a Description Tag "Selling Homes in Chicago, IL". Previously, Google would interpret the search by simply matching "selling homes" and "Chicago IL". This means the results would only show sites that used "selling homes" and Chicago IL".  

Now, the natural language search algorithm would review the same search phrase and understand that "selling homes" would be the same as "homes for sale" or "listing homes for sale".

My recommendation for business leaders is to write Title, Description and Headlines with user-driven search phrases. For example, the same real estate agency might promote "Selling homes for sale in Chicago IL" and Google would not only highly rank this site, it may also show related sub-sections of the same website where "homes for sale", "new home lists" and "chicago homes for sale" might appear.

The opportunity is for businesses to move away from simplistic keyword stuffing and begin to write towards organic or natural searches like a key prospect would search into Google.

To discuss your website and how it might be impacted by the new Google Search algorithm, let's start a conversation. Call 262-323-1776 or write me directly at [email protected].