seolounge
At Search Central Live NYC, Google’s John Mueller revisited the statistic that 15% of search queries Google sees are completely brand new and have never been encountered. He also addressed what impact the advent of AI has had on the number of novel search queries users are making today.
Understanding Language
Understanding language is important to serving relevant search queries. That means Google needs to understand the nuances of what people mean when they search, which could include unconventional use of specific words or complete misuse of words. BERT is an example of a technology that Google uses to understand user queries.
Google’s introduction to BERT explains:
“We see billions of searches every day, and 15 percent of those queries are ones we haven’t seen before–so we’ve built ways to return results for queries we can’t anticipate.
…Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like “for” and “to” matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.”
Are There More Unknown Search Queries?
In the context of an overview of Google Search John Mueller briefly discussed the statistic of new queries Google search sees and if LLMs have made any impact.
This is, according to my notes, what he said:
“15% of all queries are new every day. This is something that I’m surprised is still the case. I would have thought at some point most of the searches would have been made people just ask the same thing over and over again.
But when when we recalculate these metrics, it’s always around 15%. I imagined maybe with LLM’s and the AI systems that maybe it would be a bit higher in recent years but it’s still hovering around that number..”
He then speculated why that 15% number remains the same, attributing it to things are always changing and that life is not static.
My paraphrase of what Mueller observed:
“It’s fantastic to see because it means to me that people keep going to search and looking for something new… and if people would stop going to search or stop searching new things, and to me that would be a sign that maybe something is wrong here. So this is a great number.”
Curious Outcome
It’s amazing that something as groundbreaking like AI search and the ability to search visually would have added more complex searches that Google has never seen before but that 15% number keeps holding steady.