John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, describes how the search engine uses synonyms and if there is a human component to it. Mueller addresses this issue in response to a question made to the January 14 Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout.
The issue inquires as to how automated the process of comprehending synonyms is and whether people are engaged in assisting Google in determining which phrases are similar. Furthermore, the person who asked the query mentions that generic terms occasionally bring up information panels for significant businesses.
They use the term "moving trucks" to bring up search results for the Budget truck rental firm. Mueller addresses each of these issues in his response, which is available below.
Google's Synonym Recognition Is Completely Automated
Mueller verifies that Google's algorithm for recognizing synonyms is totally automated. There are no people creating code to educate Google's computers which terms imply the same thing.
“As far as I know, the whole synonyms system is completely automated. It’s not something where someone is manually working on a spreadsheet of synonyms and saying, ‘well this is the same as this,’ because that would never really work out.
We see something along the lines of 10-15% of queries completely new every day. So, it wouldn’t be possible for someone to keep up with this all the time.”
Mueller cites a video from a 2019 conference in which Google Engineer Paul Haahr describes the synonym system in further detail. The film provides real-world examples of Google getting synonyms incorrect and how its engineers learnt from their blunders.
“There is a video from one of the events that we did, I think like two or three years back now, where Paul Haahr, one of the engineers that works on the system, kind of presented some of the situations that we ran across with regards to synonyms, where we try to figure out like what are the synonyms here and some of the cases where we got things completely wrong.
And I thought that was really interesting to look at there. And if you’re interested around synonyms, and how google figures that out, I would definitely check that out.”
As a consequence, Mueller addresses the issue of generic terms bringing up search results for brand names. He believes that's something Google's algorithms picked up on their own. Mueller emphasizes that the automatic algorithm does not always get it right, but searchers are always invited to provide comments.
“With regards to that generic switch between “moving truck” and Budget Truck Rental, that’s something where most likely we also learn that automatically. And some of these cases we get well, where things kind of work out, or essentially kind of make sense. And some of these we get wrong.
If you see cases where we get synonyms wrong then definitely send us feedback in the search results so that we can try to figure out what we can do to improve that.”
In the video below, you can hear Mueller's complete response:
Disclaimer: This blog post is contributed by the Mediawire SEO team
To Know More About Author, click below
Rishika-https://www.linkedin.com/in/rishika-singh-4a556b160/
Bhaben-https://in.linkedin.com/in/bhaben
