How Google Synonyms Are Working More And More Effectively

As a search marketer, Google synonym functionality poses some interesting problems. We optimise for keywords that we’ve strongly researched, and try to include as many quality variants that we can without sacrificing usability and copy quality.

However, we can’t really cover every base; there are always keywords providing entry points to your site that you won’t have optimised for; usually longer tailed phrases.

As we know, Google is always looking to provide the most relevant results to its users and searchers, and to facilitate this further they’ve been doing work for years on how their algorithms deal with synonyms:

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can’t write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

Well, one of Google’s software engineers, Steven Baker, has tried to explain how Google deals with synonyms and how they are constantly trying to improve their developmental system to provide the most relevant results to searchers, even if they search for “picture frames” and mean “photo frames”.

An example of a bad synonym from this analysis is in the search [dell system speaker driver precision 360], where Google thinks “pc” is a synonym for precision.

Take 5 minutes and have a read through the article, it’s extremely interesting and Steven even provides some linked examples of where Google synonyms system plays a part in search results delivery.

Here’s the article: Helping computers understand language

Do you optimise for Google synonyms?