On Sept. 27, Google Inc. announced it made its largest upgrade since 2001 to its search algorithm.
Code-named Hummingbird, it is reinventing and upgrading the Conversational Search algorithm aspect of Google Search- and to be honest, it is nothing to write home about.
Let me put this into a high level readability.
A search algorithm (Google’s bread and butter) is basically a recipe that Google uses to sift through the billions of web pages and return the ones that it believes is the best answer for what you are searching for.
To the very large majority of the people that are reading this, you probably won’t care at all and will stop reading after I tell you these few things:
Google is upgrading its Conversation Search Algorithm due to the increased usage of Electronic Assistants (Siri or Google Voice).
No, you do not need to start using Bing or Ask Jeeves now.
No, Google is not harder to use now.
Yes, Google will still help you search for things that can help you in your essays and homework.
Yes, you will probably see a slight difference when you are Googling. To understand what I mean on this, read below.
Let me explain what I mean by point Number 4 in the most laments of terms.
With Hummingbird, Google says “Conversational Search” is upgraded and helped. Here is a good example:
Before Hummingbird:
It is a hot July day. The humidity is hitting 90 percent and the sun is laughing at the fact that you search for a comfortable spot because it knows you won’t find one.
You suddenly get the call that your friend Becky wants to go to the beach.
Becky just moved here from Oklahoma and doesn’t know anything about New Hampshire beaches.
You yourself just returned from studying abroad and have forgotten everything about N.H. beaches. So you decide to Google it.
You input “What are the best beaches in N.H. near me?”
Before Hummingbird, Google would focus on finding matches for words – finding a page that says “beaches”, “near”, and “?”, for example.
This could cause webpages such as “What are the best beaches near Cozumel?” to be returned because within the page or blog a large number of search words were within the post.
What you are truly looking for might be far down on the list, causing you to search through pages of Google results as the sun throws everything it has at you, causing you to faint and leave Becky to fry in the N.H. July sun.
After Hummingbird:
Same scenario and you go onto Google to search for those pesky beaches.
You input “What are the best beaches in N.H. near me?”. With Hummingbird now the new algorithm, Google should be able to focus better on the meaning behind your words.
It could better understand your actual location if you chose to share your location with Google, it could understand that N.H. may be an acronym for something, helping Google go far beyond finding pages that simply just match your words.
With Hummingbird, you could now have what you are looking for within the first page, allowing you and Becky to find a beach and go enjoy it quicker.
What else is there to report back on?
Now that I have probably lost about 86 percent of my reading audience by this sentence, I will get into some of the more tech nitty-gritty.
However there is not much more to report on this upgrade. In my opinion, Google’s “Caffeine Update” was much more significant for the company and its 1 billion searches a day.
To those who study this type of news, this does not mean PageRank is dead. It is still alive and is one part of the Hummingbird Engine.
To draw this to a close, it is important to state that for KSC students such as myself there is no drawback to this upgrade and will help us.
There is no true way to test the percentage of improvement, but I hypothesize that the change will be just enough to help us out, but minimal enough to have no distinct notice from the public.
The evidence to back up this hypothesis? That I forgot to mention Hummingbird has been active and live for users for the past couple of months now.
Zak Koehler can be contacted at zkoehler@keene-equinox.com