Have you ever heard of Google MUM ? Certainly, because the announcement of an algorithm update got the entire SEO community excited in the spring of 2021! These three letters hide the acronym " Multitask Unified Model . " But what are the proposed new features that are likely to shake up natural SEO in the coming years? And how can we adapt our online visibility strategy ? Let's gather all the information we have available and try to find the solutions!
In May 2021, Pandu Nayak, Google's vice president of search, officially announced the creation of a new algorithm: Google MUM . Based on ultra-high-performance artificial intelligence, this update is presented as being a thousand times more powerful than Google BERT ! It is therefore with certainty that we are on the verge of a revolution in SERP display and, more generally, in SEO. But what new features were announced at the Googleplex in Mountain View?
Provide answers to complex queries
Illustrative image: Answer to a complex question by Google MUM
The primary goal of this Google algorithm update is to be able to answer complex queries . In fact, an average of eight searches are required for Internet users to find an answer to a complicated question. Furthermore, more than half of queries are longer than four words. And this isn't going to decrease with the constant evolution of voice search ! Another notable point is that 15% of daily queries have never been searched on Google.
So Google experts rolled up their sleeves to adapt the algorithm to this new reality! During the Google MUM presentation, the following query was used as an example: " I hiked Mount Adams and I want to hike Mount Fiji next fall, how should I prepare differently? " You'll agree that this is indeed not a classic SEO query and that there is little chance that a web page would be optimized for this! However, Google, which is definitely moving towards an answer engine, is trying to find the solution to satisfy its users.
To be able to perfectly respond to the query intent , Google's new algorithm is developed on three axes . I will briefly present them below and develop them in the following paragraphs.
Multilingual : analysis of results in 75 languages.
Multimodal : Comparison azerbaijan phone number data of not only textual information, but also images. In the future, this should also include video and audio content.
Multitasking : processing several tasks simultaneously (analysis of different contents, results in several languages and providing a response).
Finally, the latest announcement about how Google MUM will be able to provide answers to complex queries is a bit scary... It will be possible for the algorithm to understand how humans communicate and how they interpret results. Is the robot psychologist soon to be a reality? To be continued...
Multilingual: Eliminating language barriers
Illustrative image: Google MUM multilingual analysis
As you may have already guessed, Google MUM wants to break down language barriers to provide comprehensive results, regardless of the query. Wherever you are in the world, the new technology will aggregate all results, regardless of the language used. If we take the query given above as an example, it's certain that quality results will be in English and Japanese, or even other languages. But that doesn't worry Google anymore!
Thanks to Transformer , the neural network architecture developed by the search engine in 2017, there are no longer any language limitations. Google MUM can thus transfer knowledge from sources in multiple languages. At the same time, the quality of instant translation has also been significantly improved. This will therefore make it possible to offer relevant results in all languages .
Multimodal: understanding the different types of information