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Google just got a bit better at understanding your confusing search queries

Google Search is getting smarter.

google search page
Image: Google

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Google Search has always been pretty good at figuring out what you’re trying to ask, but now it’ll be even better. That’s because now, Search doesn’t just look at the keywords, it also looks at how the sentence is put together to try and figure out your intent.

The skinny? You should get search results that are much more relevant to the question you are asking.

Google’s search engine will now be better at understanding your conversational queries

image showing Google's new natural language processing search at work
Image: Google

That new leap in understanding your queries is made possible by Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or as Google calls it, BERT, which helps tailor search to the intent behind a question, not just the words in the question. Pretty darn clever.

This also needs some hefty hardware to run, so the new, super-powered Cloud TPUs are serving search now so the complex BERT routines don’t grind Google’s servers to a halt.

Here are some fun snippets of information about Google Search:

  • Out of the billions of queries a day, fifteen percent of them are ones Google hasn’t seen before
  • The 20-year-old search page is still the lynchpin of its digital advertising business, which rakes in $115 billion a year in sales

The new natural language processing isn’t limited to Search though, the new Google Assistant on the Pixel 4 also understands human language better. This makes optimizing website content by SEO companies that much harder to complete.

What do you think? Glad to see Google Search getting a revamp? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.

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