Google Proposed A New Approach To Answer User's Queries
Today, web and social media are the primary sources of information. How users search information and what result they expect, co-evolve with the sophistication of these resources. Now everyone expects direct answers to their compositional queries, rather than document retrieval or factual question answering approach.
At the 6th International Conference on Learning Representations, Google Research published a research paper titled Ask the Right Questions, detailing an algorithm that offers a new way to answer users’ queries.
If Google updates this algorithm, traditional practices of page ranking will change significantly, and it will have far-reaching impact. Companies that understand users queries and provide specific answers on their website content are more likely to be ranked by Google.
This is a challenge for the SEO community that traditionally believes that search engine is solely responsible to rank web pages. As per the traditional understanding, ranking factors such as links, anchor text, text in title tag were some of the deciding factors and help ranking one among ten in the search result pages.
Even though factors like links are still considered important to rank in the search result, but with the new, machine learning algorithm, links can contribute to ranking only, won’t be a deciding factor.
There is another algorithm that decides what pages are the best answer to a particular question, based on the set of pages it received.
Let’s Understand This Algorithm in Simple Language.
In the research paper, Google discussed a way to reformulate queries before presenting them to a ranking engine. Google already use Query reformulation and stemming. This is just another form of that approach. In order to perform better and rank high in Google, SEO players need to understand the working of this algorithm.
Why This Algorithm Matters
This machine learning algorithm has come with one of the strongest approaches, called Reinforcement learning. This approach is gaining traction in understanding natural language across many problems. It was also used to learn to play Go and video games like Doom.
This algorithm is getting SEO attention because it’s acting as an agent between users and regular ranking algorithm and making the decisions. Hence, rather than letting search engine decide what will be displayed to the users in the search result pages, this machine learning algorithm is deciding on its own.
You might have understood the importance of this algorithm, read more to know how can this affect SEO.