Last week Google announced one of the biggest revision to their search algorithm called “Hummingbird”. Just a month earlier, without the users’ knowledge Google had introduced the search algorithm, which is under the poetic name Hummingbird (Hummingbird).
The aim of the Hummingbird updates is to provide users relevant search results to more complex search requests. The algorithm now no longer relies on simple keyword matching on websites but trying to recognize phrases and to find appropriate contexts.
Last year, with the introduction of The Knowledge Graph it was an appropriate step in this direction, because the Knowledge Graph recognizes information about specific places, people, things, etc and the relationship between them.
In the past two years, the proportion of searches that are made by phone and voice input, has also increased. Whether auto-complete, context-sensitive search, precaching or universal search – the more comfortable search options that Google introduced in the past, users now represent more complex search queries easily. Thus, this new algorithm is a logical development by Google.
However, the introduction of the Hummingbird algorithm is not the only innovation by Google on it’s 15th birthday: The Knowledge Graph can now compare two things together. In the official blog post this, there is a nice example: You want to know how much butter has saturated fat compared to olive oil? Just search for “comparative butter olive oil”. Users can now able to set filters in their quest to specialize the query easily.