Google Makes Its Search Smarter for a 15th Birthday Gift

Google - one of the largest, richest, and most influential technology companies in the world - is only 15 years old. In celebration, Google is revealing an upgrade to its first and most pervasive product: search.

The new upgrade to Google Search is codenamed Hummingbird, and it's the first major change to the world's most popular search engine in three years.

Hummingbird actually has been in use for about a month, though you may not have noticed it. It's been gradually introduced to Google's search page over several weeks, so the Mountain View giant could check on how usable and efficient the new engine is. According to BBC News, Hummingbird already effectively runs on 90 percent of searches on Google now. So far, understandably, Google has been skittish on providing details about the new search engine, but offered broad strokes about what changes Hummingbird was bringing.

Hummingbird is the name of a new search algorithm that Google hopes will make using Search more conversational, natural, and "human" than it has ever been. Unlike the previous search algorithm, Caffeine, Hummingbird is based more on understanding search request strings and the concepts and relationships between search terms. Caffeine, as the name implies, was more about the power of indexing sites.

Part of the reason why Hummingbird has been introduced is that searches have gotten much more complex in recent years, growing commonality of voice searching on mobile internet devices. Hummingbird, in part, is built for conversational search, where a spoken search can take shape as more of a dialogue than the sometimes awkward command-based traditional search.

Danny Sullivan expert from SearchEngineLand explained it this way:

People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation. 

"What's the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?" A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words - finding a page that says "buy" and "iPhone 5s," for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you've shared that with Google. It might understand that "place" means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that "iPhone 5s" is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

Google has already been doing some of this with its Knowledge Graph, which continues to expand onto new platforms and in depth of content.

For those of you who may have a website to run and are nervous about the changes - changes to Google's search algorithm often spur shockwaves in the business community, as nearly every online business is potentially effected whenever a tweak takes effect - don't worry... too much. Hummingbird is not replacing PageRank, but will actually incorporate it into its code; the rulebook on search engine optimization needn't be wholly re-written.

However, according to the USA Today, sites that provide a lot of reference information like WebMD could see threats coming from the continued expansion of Knowledge Graph, which brings answers to search enquiries right on the results page - with no outside link needed.