Google Improves Search Accuracy Via Hummingbird Update
Marking Google’s 15th birthday, the Hummingbird update was release which is the biggest change to the inner workings of the world’s most popular search engine since Google’s “Caffeine” update in 2010, which sped up Google’s indexing of sites and delivery of search results.
The Hummingbird update focuses more on Google’s Knowledge Graph – an encyclopaedia of about 570m concepts and relationships that allows Google to anticipate facts and figures you might want to know about your search term.
When you search Google it no longer just searches for individual keywords; it can now respond to questions and statements in the same way a human might, by looking at the whole query – even if it doesn’t have an exact answer.
Apart from ‘Hummingbird’, several other updates have been announced, with most aiming at providing the data more concisely to allow people not to navigate to another website to find out more – which can prove difficult on small smart phone screens.
“Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You’d sit down and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem, type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had those words,” Senior vice president Amit Singhal wrote in a separate blog post.
“The world has changed so much since then: billions of people have come online, the web has grown exponentially, and now you can ask any question on the powerful little device in your pocket.”
These changes mainly affect the ‘Knowledge Graph’, a box that appears on top or alongside other search results. In particular, its new version will be able to compare the attributes of two different things. ‘Google Now’, a virtual assistant that provides for the user the information about his interests and location, will start flagging new developments – for example, in the life of a celebrity – that interest the user.
