Hummingbird- The biggest change in Google’s algorithm

Google has recently rewrote its core algorithm which controls the answers that we get to our queries on the search engine in bid to make it work better for even longer, more complicated questions.

The updated code-named as Hummingbird is the largest change to underpinnings of world’s chief search engine since 2010, when Google updated its algorithm to  the one it named Caffeine. Google made this change about one month before which it announced at the press event in garage of Menlo Park house (Calif.) where Google began. The event celebrated 15th anniversary also of Google’s founding.

Most people won’t observe an overt difference in search results. However with more number of people making more difficult queries, particularly as they can speak their searches in their smartphones increasingly, there’s a requirement for new mathematical formula to handle them.

The update to this algorithm focuses much more on ranking the sites for better importance by tapping into the company Knowledge Graph further, its encyclopedia of approx 570 million relationships and concepts among them, as per Amit Singhal, senior VP of Google’s of search. Caffeine was much more focused on good crawling and indexing of sites to the speed results.

After the event, a Google’s chief engineering director, Scott Huffman, currently working on the natural language, told that part of impetus for change was as more individuals speak of searches into their phones, they’re doing this in a much more natural means than they used to type in their queries–which is more complicated. Thus Google’s search formulas required to be capable to reply to them.

Partly that’s through even greater use of Knowledge Graph, so the obvious discrete terms could be identified fast. But it also is interesting that though the queries are getting much more complex, that always doesn’t mean it’s difficult to find the correct answers. The more expressions people utilize, Huffman says, more contexts Google can divine. Therefore the extra words, even though they’re in more complex query, could give Google better details–however only if algorithms are attuned to be capable to identify the relationship amongst those terms. Finally, he says, “we wish to get to natural conversation” between Google search and people on whatever devices they use.

“in general, Google says – Hummingbird is a latest engine built on new and existing parts both, organized in the way to particularly serve search demands of present, rather than the one created for needs of tens years ago, with technologies back,” said Danny Sullivan from the search blog of Search Engine Land.

This will benefit those people using more current forms of search, like voice or conversational search, where you can ask Google any question instead o typing keywords in its search box. “The aim is that the pages matching the meanings do better, instead of pages matching a few words only.

“Google said, Hummingbird is paying much more attention to every word in any query, making sure that the entire query – the entire sentence or meaning or conversation – is taken into the account, instead of specific words