Tech&Trends Search Engine What You Should Know About ’s Hummingbird Algorithm As Google turns fifteen, the search behemoth rolls out the most significant Algorithm update in the last ten years to ensure users get the best possible answers than ever by matching keyword semantics with documents on the web, and not links — Mastufa Ahmed

oogle’s core algorithm, which controls answers that we get when we google a query online, gets a refresh, with an update Gdubbed Hummingbird that signifies speed and accuracy. “This is the biggest change, which affects 90% of global searches, to the underpinnings of Google Turns 15! ever since the search giant embarked on a semantic search Milestones That Shaped journey”, said Google execs at a press event that was held Google Search Paradigm in the garage of the Menlo Park house in California where 2001: Search 2005: Google Suggest ( Autocomplete) Google started. 2007: Universal Search 2010: Google Instant, Caffeine Web-indexing Anticipating what you might want 2012: Concepts-based Knowledge Graphs to know 2012: Voice search & Although this is a major overhaul from Google search, 2013: Advance Knowledge Graph

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31st December '13. Terms and conditions apply users may not have noticed all the change that this update New Features in Hummingbird has brought to the table. That’s because this has more While the Caffeine update, which was launched in 2010, to do with strengthening of the foundation of the search was more focused on better indexing and crawling of algorithm in order for it to be able to handle more complex sites, Hummingbird is focused on ranking sites better for and long tail queries. It rather adds to the capabilities relevance. The much touted Knowledge Graphs get smarter of its existing Knowledge Graph, which can make sense with comparisons and filters. See the image alongside. of more than 500m concepts and their intertwining Google is also launching a new version of the Google relationships. For instance, when you conduct a search Search Apps on iPhone and iPad over the next few days. with keyword ‘Eiffel Tower’, the engine can ready answers “With this update, you will be able to you can get no- under the hoods on related questions like the height or the tifications across your devices. So if you tell your Nexus history of the tower, etc that you you may end up asking 7, “OK Google. Remind me to buy olive oil at Safeway,” subsequently. when you walk into the store with your iPhone, you’ll This is how Google takes search to the next level get a reminder. We’ll also show you Google Now notifi- serving you more semantic based search results by pars- cations, so that you’re not late to your cooking class, “ ing the meaning behind phrases as a whole rather than said , SVP, Google Search, in a blog post. individual words within a search query. To sum up, you can now ask Google questions like “How much saturated fat is in butter versus olive oil?”, Meaning of queries Vs documents “OK Google. Remind me to buy olive oil at Safeway.”, and on the web so on. Natural language processing (NLP) has been in for years now. However, it’s only recently that the technology starts gaining momentum. The latest changes being embedded to search algorithm is about tweaking its engine to handle queries that users make in the more natural way by making sense of extra words in the long tail query. This way, Google search is heading towards enabling a natural conversation between Google search and people irrespective the type of device you are using. The search also wades an extra mile to provide users more data on the search results page as well, than re- quiring him to click on a link to get answers. For instance, when you type in ‘delhi to london’ in Google search, you can see a long list of flights along with their frequencies, duration, etc on top of the regular search results.

5 Tips to Optimize for Google Hummingbird This is a reminder for digital marketers to ‘write for users and not search engines’. Here are some measures that you can embrace to stay on top of the impending changes. • Add more user generated content to your site with product reviews, forums, Q&As, and conversations and attribute content to the authorship via Google+. • Before you market your niche keywords, analyze us- ers’ discussions around them and tweak your pages accordingly • Look beyond the traditional keywords. Complex and long tail keywords are given more preference by Hummingbird. • Consider adding to the number of unique entrance pages used by your users to land to your website. • Figure out audience’s frequently asked questions. pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] NOVEMBER 2013 PCQuest 21