REPOST: Google Search will soon understand normal questions, not just keywords

Interesting post from Rachel Kaser.

Ever had to search for something on Google, but you're not exactly sure what it is, so you just use some language that vaguely implies it? Google's about to make that a whole lot easier.

Google announced today it's rolling out a new machine learning-based language understanding technique called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or BERT. BERT helps decipher your search queries based on the context of the language used, rather than individual words. According to Google, "when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English."