Have you ever struggled with framing the right queries for your Google search? There are often times when questions for your search are not as straightforward as it usually is otherwise. While searching for a restaurant near you or a product for instance, what you put in the search box is pretty straightforward. But oftentimes there are words that have dual meanings and the search might take you in a completely different direction because of the keywords typed in and the words around the keyword.
 
The BERT update affects search queries that are complicated and displays results that are relevant to the context of the sentence as a whole. It improves language understanding, and with natural language or conversational searches, BERT ensures a better understanding of the entire context of words that are put in which ensures accurate results.
 
BERT is basically a language processing approach that helps improve search query understanding by better identifying the natural language text from the web, especially in conversational type of searches. Here is an example of BERT and Context from Google:
 
Take the search phrase “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.” The word “to” and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, algorithms wouldn't understand the importance of this connection, and returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.
 
Although BERT affects a small percentage (10%) of Search results, it can still have an impact on organic search results, depending on what people search for.
 
But, general advice is to not worry. This is all about the user, returning better and more relevant results for the query. So the advice is to continue focusing on good quality, fresh and relevant content, as this already knows to be favored by Google.
 
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