For months, we’ve been fed bits and pieces of information about Google’s BERT, a machine learning technique that promises to be the future of language models and SEO. More than focusing on a couple of keywords, BERT better understands the nuances and context of words – but, as we learned last week, this type of model trained on large datasets could be biased.
Well, what if Google has access to a less well-known and less understood algorithm that can comprehend long-form content even better than BERT? According to Search Engine Journal’s Roger Montti, it does: Meet SMITH.
In a stunning summary of a recently published research paper put out by Google, Montti does a deep dive into SMITH and its ability to understand long pieces of content and influence Google’s passage ranking update.
Some of the most compelling takeaways from Montti’s article are:
- There is no indication of whether or not Google is using the SMITH algorithm. Following its trend of staying tight-lipped, Google has only said that SMITH outperforms BERT, not that SMITH is presently in use.
- BERT is by no means perfect. Its imitations include long-form documents, which the model is not well-suited to understand.
- The SMITH algorithm is trained to predict entire blocks of sentences. Apparently, we’re in the year 3021, because SMITH is not only learning the relationship between words but the context of paragraphs and how they relate to one another.
- SMITH doesn’t replace BERT; it supplements it. Where BERT is unable to perform, SMITH can pick up the slack.
There are no if, buts or maybes about it: SMITH really, truly works. Montti says the authors of the paper state with complete confidence that SMITH is the best model Google has found for understanding language.
So, what does this mean? For the moment, there’s not much SEOs can or need to do because Google hasn’t explicitly stated that SMITH is actively in use. But one thing we know for sure is that passage ranking is imminent, and it seems like SMITH is the ideal model for making it work.
What’s more, the research paper doesn’t mention a single shortcoming of SMITH, painting a near-perfect picture of the model. It seems very likely that, if SMITH is not in use already, it will be very soon. We’ll be following the updates closely because it’s looking more and more like SEO could be in for a shake-up yet again.
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