How Google Ranks Pages With Abbreviations

A question about how Google’s algorithm handles abbreviations was answered by Google’s John Mueller. John went into great detail in response to the question, explaining that these are essentially synonyms and that Google doesn’t do anything special with abbreviations.

When it comes to abbreviations, how does Google handle them?

The person who asked the question was curious about how Google handled abbreviations like “eg,” which stands for “ergo.”

They mentioned that their website has a lot of these types of abbreviations.

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“And the short answer is we don’t do anything special with those kinds of things.
We essentially treat them as tokens on a page.
And a token is essentially kind of like a word or a phrase on a page.
And we would probably recognize that there are known synonyms for some of these and understand that a little bit.
But we wouldn’t really do anything specific there in that we’d like have a glossary of what this abbreviation means and handle that in a specific way.
So that’s something where, especially when it comes to synonyms, our systems learn these over time.
And for the most part, we handle them when people search and not when we do the indexing.”

Next, John Mueller suggests watching a video of Google Search Engineer Paul Haahr speaking at a search conference, which was published by Google Search Central and in which he discusses the use of synonyms for query expansion.

Mueller says:

“And in that video, he goes through some of the synonym challenges that we’ve run across in the past.
And I found that super interesting to look at and probably also gives you some ideas on how we might handle some of these kind of expansions when it comes to abbreviations.”

The video, according to Mueller, was posted on Google Search Central’s YouTube channel in December 2019 or 2020.

And, yes, there is a video from 2019 that was released in 2020, in which Paul Haahr discusses synonyms and query expansion.

At the 1:30 minute mark, Paul discusses query expansion and synonyms:

Paul Haahr Discusses Synonyms and Query Expansion in a Google Video

“So first I’m going to talk about something in one of our language understanding systems, which is the synonym system.”

The screen behind Paul shows the following text:

“User vocabulary ≠ Document vocabulary
System tries to bridge the gap by automatically adding alternative words
Similar to using OR, but usually less important than original terms
One of Google Search’s most important components”

Paul Haahr explains the purpose of using synonyms:

“So what is our synonym system?
It’s something that is there to bridge the gap between the user vocabulary and query vocabulary – or user vocabulary and document vocabulary.
That is, when we see a query, it often is written in a different language than the documents used.
And we’re trying to match those things.
The way this actually works is, it looks a lot like we add a bunch of terms with OR.
Who here in the audience has used the OR operator?
And the way our synonyms system works is effectively, we take a user query and we add a lot of OR terms to it.
And this is actually one of Google’s most important ranking components… that it’s sort of.. it’s something that we launched roughly 15-plus years ago, has improved a lot over the years.”

Paul Haahr Discusses Synonyms and Query Expansion in More Videos

There is another video of Paul Haahr speaking about query expansion at SMX West in 2016, which also sheds some light on the subject.

At the 6:35 mark in the presentation, Paul discusses Query Expansion:

Paul Haahr, a Google engineer, talks about synonyms in this video.

This isn’t the video that John Mueller was referring to, but it does contain some useful information.

Paul Haahr explains:

“We do a query understanding part where we try to figure out what the query means, we do retrieval and scoring… and then we do some …adjustments.
So Query Understanding, first question is, do we know any named entities in the query?
The San Jose Convention Center, we know what that is. Matt Cutts, we know what that is.
And so we label those.
And then, are there useful synonyms?
Does General Motors in this context… does GM mean General Motors?
Does GM mean mean genetically modified?
And my point there is just that context matters.
We look at the whole query for context.”

Abbreviations and Google

In his response, Mueller appears to be implying that Google considers abbreviations to be synonyms. As a result, when considering how Google might interpret a page of content, an abbreviation could be reduced to a core meaning that could be viewed as a synonym.