We’re excited to bring cutting-edge, generative AI front and center in Google Search. For decades, AI has been helping Google Search under the hood, allowing us to reimagine how people interact with and discover information, improve quality and relevance, and support a healthy open web. In fact, one of our first applications of machine learning in a Google product was our early spelling correction system back in 2001 — over two decades ago — which helped people get relevant results faster, regardless of spelling mistakes or typos.
In recent years, breakthroughs in AI have dramatically improved Search. In 2019, we brought Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to Search ranking, resulting in a huge step change in search quality. Rather than aiming to understand words individually, BERT helped Search understand words in the context that they were used, empowering people to ask longer, more conversational queries and get connected with more relevant, helpful results.
