Google Hummingbird: Biggest Update From Google Since Caffeine Update

Google, which has just completed 15 years, has brought out a significant update to its search algorithm. A day before its 15th anniversary, Amit Singhal, Senior VP of Google held a press conference in a garage that was rented out to Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Susuan Wojkcicki. 

This garage located at Menlo Park, California, is where Google was started 15 years ago. In this press conference, it was announced that a technological update of Google search has been introduced and it was named Hummingbird. 

Google said that this update was designed to help the search engine handle queries that are complex in nature. Google had introduced this update to its core search technology about a month ago and this update is said to affect 90 percent of the searches that are made worldwide.

According to Amit Singhal, this update will help to keep the search engine results relevant to what users are searching for and that it was a culmination of 15 years of work by Google. Fundamental rethinking of the way search results are fetched has been done to provide users with relevant results. 

Such a major overhaul of the search engine was done in 2010 when Google rolled out the Caffeine update, which was primarily to improve the indexing speed of the search engine and to provide fresher results to users. Google has been tight lipped on how the new Hummingbird update works and have not answered to the many questions that have been put forth to them by reporters.

Insights on Google Hummingbird update

• The Hummingbird update from Google will help the search engine to parse full questions quickly. Earlier the results were displayed by parsing searches word by word.
• This update will help to identify and rank the answers for the questions entered by the user from the content that has been indexed by Google.
• The use of keywords for fetching search results is no longer in practice and this has put a lot of emphasis on the quality of content available in the pages.
• The emphasis will shift from matching keywords to understanding what results the user wants from the searches.
• The importance of providing quality content to the audience will therefore gain more importance and this will help businesses that have focused on providing content that audiences are looking for.
• Google Hummingbird update is said to be next step taken by Google to separate quality content from the riffraff available on the internet.

It is true that there will be a huge impact on internet marketing due to the Google Hummingbird update. However, businesses that have been ensuring that they provide content that is required by their target audiences will have little to worry about. 

Marketers who were focused only on keywords will now have to rethink their strategy, as they will not be able to get the intended audience by just stuffing keywords into irrelevant content. The Hummingbird update will be beneficial to the Google search engine users in finding the kinds of results that they are looking for, and the onus is now upon the businesses and the marketers to provide information that will be beneficial to their target audience.

  Atanu Shaw

About the Author:

Atanu Shaw is a freelance SEO analyst who has the experience of handling various internet marketing campaigns for businesses. He writes regular seo tips on best seo company India blog.