Google Search Now Reads at a Higher Level

Google search is advancing a reading grade. Google says it has enhanced its search-ranking system with software called BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers to its friends. It was developed in the company's artificial intelligence labs and announced last fall, breaking records on reading comprehension questions that researchers use to test AI software. Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of search, said at a briefing Thursday that the muppet-monickered software has made Google's search algorithm much better at handling long queries, or ones where the relationships between words are crucial. You're now less likely to get frustrating responses to queries dependent on prepositions like for" and "to," or negations such as "not" or "no." "This is the single biggest positive change we've had in the last five years," Nayak said--at least according to Google's measures of how ranking changes help people find what they want.