Hummingbird – New Google Search Algorithm announced
Hummingbird – Google announce their new search Algorithm
A day before their 15th Birthday, Google went back to their roots – literally.
In the garage where Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the world’s largest search engine, Google announced a handful of new changes including a major update to their search algorithm called “Hummingbird”.
The new Hummingbird algorithm, which has been in place for nearly a month, affects 90% of all searches said Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google.
So what is Google Hummingbird?
Despite many questions from the audience on just how does Hummingbird work, Google avoided getting too technical.
What they did say, and kept repeating, was that this was the biggest overhaul to their engine since their 2010 “Caffeine” update. Caffeine provided 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last index (see Google Caffeine Blog post), and that the Hummingbird algorithm focuses on more advanced search queries rather than parsing searches word by word.
The new algorithm is designed to accommodate questions on par with what someone might ask a friend rather than the usual short keyword query we are used to.
For example, rather than “web design innerleithen” users may now search for “are there any web design companies in innerleithen?”
Google summise that internet users are becoming more comfortable with searching and move beyond the one or two word searches or short directed terms eg: “web +design +innerleithen”, and users will begin to type real questions into search engines. Google aim to be the first to accommodate this and provide good quality results.
How will Google Hummingbird affect me?
Well, Google silently pushed Hummingbird out a few weeks back so if you haven’t noticed any large spikes or drops in traffic already then the answer is it won’t!
And finally, if you’d like to remind yourself how Google looked back in 1998 then search Google for “Google in 1998” or click here to go directly back in time. It’s amazing how little it’s changed since then but then why change something that works.
