On Google’s 15th birthday, a new search algorithm was revealed. Many have wondered what this means and what effects it has online. Here is a short overview on the change.
Named “Hummingbird” for being precise and fast, it was created to return better search results. While it launched in early fall, Google made the announcement on September 26th. Three years ago, “Caffeine Update” was launched to help better gather information rather than actually sort information. But it has been over 10 years since the algorithm has changed this dramatically. Hummingbird was designed especially to handle complex queries, better understanding the user’s intent when searching and offering the most relevant results. So instead of generic phrases – “search: Baseball stadium”, while sorting through pages yourself, you can be more conversational to get the results you want faster – “search: Give me aerial photos of Fenway Park”. Searching by voice or cellphone is the norm and Google knows that. And since these days, time is money, we could all use shortcuts.
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