We are often confronted with alternative words each time we wrongly spell a keyword in Google Search. Any word not properly spelt could affect the outcome of our search queries; and that explains the reason why Google has announced that a new spell checker will be added to Search.
Powered by artificial intelligence, Google’s new spell checker aims to provide us with improved search results. The too, which will be added in the coming weeks, will help to identify even the most poorly spelt search queries.
“We’ve continued to improve our ability to understand misspelled words, and for good reason—one in 10 queries every day are misspelled. Today, we’re introducing a new spelling algorithm that uses a deep neural net to significantly improve our ability to decipher misspellings. In fact, this single change makes a greater improvement to spelling than all of our improvements over the last five years.”
15 percent of search queries on Google Search everyday according to Raghavan Prabhakar, are words that have never been seen before. That means the search engine giant has to keep working tirelessly to improve results.
Last year, Google announced a significant update on how natural results are presented. Underlining how search queries over the years have transformed and how Google has been able to improve Search to meet the heavy demands from users, the company explained why it is important to improve on understanding of natural search queries.
This will be achieved by applying a neural network-based technique known as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers or BERT for short. BERT according to Google, “enables anyone to train their own state-of-the-art question answering system.”
The change was prompted by acknowledging how Search’s language understanding capabilities are still prone to failures, especially when they are complex. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons why people often use “keyword-ese,” typing strings of words that they think we’ll understand, but aren’t actually how they’d naturally ask a question.”
So, how does BERT work? According to Google, this “breakthrough came as a result of research on transformers: modes that process words in relation to all the other words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order.” BERT’s role will be to consider full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. This is important when it comes to understanding the intent behind such search queries.
Search has really come a long way, and remains Google’s major product with millions of visitors everyday.
