Google’s BERT Update: Search Understands Queries Better Than Ever

The world’s best-known search engine updates its algorithm regularly to improve user experience and the relevance of its results. But this time is different. Google has just rolled out the biggest update to its algorithm in five years: the Google BERT update. That’s worth a closer look.

An Endless Stream of Google Searches

Every day, people run billions of searches on Google. 15% of them are queries Google has never seen before, as Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and vice president of Search, explains in his blog post. The conclusion is clear: people are endlessly curious!

Google Search has worked on ways to give the best possible answers to every query. It’s a massive undertaking, built on understanding language.

Better Understanding of How People Actually Talk

Understanding a language is one thing. Truly grasping its expressions and different registers is another. That’s what Google’s Search teams focused on, leading to the biggest update in five years.

People often type a string of keywords rather than a full sentence or question. Thanks to a team dedicated to language science and understanding, Google has made major progress in interpreting this kind of search. Google calls it one of the biggest leaps forward in the history of Search. No small claim.

Meet BERT

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP). Sounds impressive, but what does it actually mean?

Put simply, BERT helps Google better understand how the words in a search relate to each other. Before, words and phrases were processed one by one.

BERT Sees What You’re Getting At

Searches are now understood with much more precision, in particular because BERT takes small words like prepositions into account and looks at how all the words in the query connect. BERT also does a better job with longer queries and those phrased in a more natural, conversational way.

The results are more relevant, which makes every search easier and faster while improving the user experience.

BERT Launches for English Searches in the U.S.

Before its official launch, BERT went through extensive testing and several rounds of improvements. For now, the BERT update affects about one in 10 English-language searches in the U.S. Other languages and other countries will follow over time.

BERT is a remarkable tool with the ability to apply what it learns about one language to others. Still, understanding language, whatever the language, is a daily challenge for Google Search, and a nearly endless one. That’s why Google keeps working continuously to improve how it understands every query.

Where Things Stand in 2026

In December 2019, Google expanded BERT to more than 70 languages, and by October 2020 it said BERT was used in almost every English-language query. BERT is now one of the ranking systems Google documents publicly, and it was followed by MUM, the Multitask Unified Model, announced in 2021.

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