During a hangout submitted question and answer segment, one SEO professional asked John Mueller regarding Google’s synonym system: how automated is it?
In their example that they provided, the phrase “automobile rental” brings up rental cars. This makes sense.
But, they are also seeing situations where searches for generic keyword phrases like “moving truck” or “rental truck” will actually show a brand budget truck rental instead of the synonym, or no alteration at all.
This is similar to a person searching for something like “Inkjet printer” and then getting HP’s knowledge panel.
John explained that the entire synonym system is completely automated. It’s not something where someone is manually working on a spreadsheet of synonyms and saying “Well, this is the same as this,” because that would never really work out.
John also said that they see something along the lines of 10 to 15 percent of entirely new queries every day.
It wouldn’t be possible for anyone to keep up with this manually all the time.
Additionally, he referred to a video from one of their events with Paul Haar, one of the engineers who works on the system who presented some of the situations they ran into regarding synonyms.
They try to figure out what are the synonyms here, and some of the cases where they got things completely wrong.
John thinks this video is really interesting to look at.
And, if you’re interested in synonyms and how Google figures this out, he would definitely check this out.
As far as the generic switch between moving truck and Budget Truck Rental, this is something where most likely Google also learned that automatically. In some of these cases, things just kind of worked out or made sense.
In other cases, they get it wrong. If there are situations you see where Google gets it wrong, then definitely send them this feedback in the search results.
This way, they can try and figure out what they can do to improve this.
This happens at approximately the 38:02 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
John (Submitted Question) 38:02
Then synonyms, how automated is it? Is there a human component, for example, automobile rentals brings up rental cars. That makes a lot of sense. I’m seeing situations where searches for generic keyword phrase “moving truck” or “rental truck” shows a brand “budget truck rental” instead of a synonym or no alteration at all.
It’s similar to a person searching for “inkjet printer” and then getting HP’s knowledge panel in addition.
John (Answer) 38:33
So as far as I know, the whole synonym system is completely automated. It’s not something where someone is manually working on a spreadsheet of synonyms and kind of like saying, Well, this is the same as this, because that would never really work out. We see, I think, somewhere along the lines of 10 to 15% of queries completely new every day. So it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to kind of like, keep up with this all the time.
There is a video from one of the events that we did, I think like two, three years back now, where Paul Haar, one of the engineers that works on this system, kind of presented some of the situations that we ran across with regards to synonyms, where we try to figure out like, what are the synonyms here and some of the cases where we got things completely wrong.
And I thought that was really interesting to look at there. And if you’re interested about synonyms and how Google figures that out, I would definitely check that out. With regards to that kind of generic switch between “moving truck” and Budget Truck Rental, that’s something where most likely we also learned that automatically and some of these cases we get well or where things kind of work out or essentially it kind of makes sense. And some of these we get wrong.
If you see cases where we get synonyms wrong, then definitely send us feedback in the search results. So that we can try to figure out what we can do to improve that.
