“Hummingbird” – A New Google Search Algorithm

Google has a new search algorithm, it’s for the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when people search and come back with answers.

The new algorithm is called “Hummingbird” and the name come from being “precise and fast.”. The company launched its latest “Hummingbird” algorithm about a month ago and that it currently affects 90% of worldwide searches via Google. The company claims it should return better results. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

‘Hummingbird” is the company’s effort to match the meaning of queries with that of documents on the Internet.  “Panda”, “Penguin” and the other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole.  Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda.

“Conversational search” is one of the algorithm’s features. Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It might better understand the actual location of your company, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a gadget store. It might get that “iPhone 7s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google than just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that the new algorithm is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole search query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than certain words. The goal tends to be that pages matching the meaning fare better, rather than pages matching just a couple of words.