Google is getting better at understanding your awkwardly phrased searches

Google is rolling out new technology to improve the results it serves up when you type in a search query, though you might not even notice.

On Friday, the company announced that it is starting to use an artificial intelligence system developed in its research labs, known as BERT (which stands for "Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers"), to help answer conversational English-language queries, initially from US users. The changes are meant to improve how the technology that underpins the world's largest search engine understands the ways language and context work together — and give users better responses to their searches, from "can you get medicine for someone pharmacy" to "parking on a hill with no curb."