Google this morning announced the rollout of a new algorithm, BERT, in what is the biggest change to the company's search platform since the introduction of Rankbrain in 2015. The update began rolling out on Monday this week and is expected to impact 10% of search queries.

This is a serious show of tech muscle from Google, with new super computers built to run it reportedly breaking AI records.

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, which unless you have a very technical PHD, probably means nothing. Put simply, instead of processing each word in a query in isolation, the machine learning used looks at the words surrounding it to understand the context and provide more accurate results. 

Users will be able to write (or speak) in language that suits them, without the need to adapt their queries multiple times to generate the required results.

Google provided us with some examples of this in practice here.

Both traditional organic results and featured snippets will be impacted. As Google better understands the intent behind a consumer's search, the update may also affect when featured snippets are shown and the type of featured snippet used.