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Well that was quicker than most expected, Google has taken BERT, which launched in late October for English language queries in the US in core search and expanded it to 70 languages internationally. In fact, it surprised Danny Sullivan and John Mueller of Google in how fast it launched globally.
Yesterday, Danny Sullivan (while on vacation, I believe), said on Twitter "Actually, apparently it is out more broadly" when asked if it is launched globally:
Pedro Dias asked Danny:
Despite no official word from Google, it seems BERT is now live for other languages beyond English. Can you confirm @dannysullivan @searchliaison?
— Pedro Dias: ~/pedro$ (@pedrodias) December 9, 2019
Busca do Google terá sua maior mudança em cinco anos com novo algoritmo - Estadão https://t.co/ZI5mxTuEe7
Danny first responded negative but then said, no, it is live:
Actually, apparently it is out more broadly. I'll share more on @searchliaison shortly.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 9, 2019
Danny then posted on the @searchliaison that it was not live in 70 languages:
BERT, our new way for Google Search to better understand language, is now rolling out to over 70 languages worldwide. It initially launched in Oct. for US English. You can read more about BERT below & a full list of languages is in this thread.... https://t.co/NuKVdg6HYM
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 9, 2019
Which languages?
Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 9, 2019
Malay (Brunei Darussalam & Malaysia), Malayalam, Maltese, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Polish.... (MORE)
And yes, Spanish!
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 9, 2019
Sooner than expected. Seems this international rollout happened sooner than both Danny Sullivan and John Mueller expected. Here is John:
Sounds like it was earlier than I guessed :) (also, afaik I didn't really mention any specific time, just that I thought it would take longer). Would you have done anything differently?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) December 9, 2019
Yea, nothing to optimize for - so does it matter?
Bing has been using BERT globally for a longer time...
So in any event, still 10% of all queries, but now internally in these 70 languages.
It varies by language but is generally in line with the 1 of 10 figure we shared about US English.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) December 10, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.
