BERT comes to Google Search, its biggest change since 2015

Pandu Nayak, Google's VP of Search, announced that BERT had been applied to Search, improving its handling of longer, conversational queries where small words such as prepositions carry the meaning. Google said it would affect one in ten queries and called it the biggest change to search since RankBrain in 2015. The post used the query "2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa" as an example, explaining that previous algorithms had missed that it concerned a Brazilian traveling to the US. Research the company had published a year earlier was now running inside one of the world's largest services.