Google is known as a company that reiterates its products continuously. With Search as their main source of revenue, Google gives it critical attention.

The search algorithm as the backbone of Google Search is one of the products with paramount importance and value to Google. In a recent update to the search algorithm called ‘Hummingbird’, Google has proved that it takes search very seriously. Today we are going to help you understand what Hummingbird is, the updates that Google has wrapped up inside this algorithm, what’s good about it, and last but not the least, how it is going to affect businesses. So, let’s get to it.

Hummingbird 101

On account of its 15th Birthday, Google launched Hummingbird, a natural or human way of searching on Google and “the largest update for Google Search in the past three years”, says Amit Singal, Senior Vice President at Google. Hummingbird equipped Google Search with the understanding of human-like searches.

I know what you’re wondering, err… human-like searches? Well, if you are one of the many people who usually ask Google questions rather than using keywords for search this is good news for you. With Hummingbird running inside Google Search, it is able to understand long complex sentences such as questions that humans naturally write or speak instead of breaking down searches among keywords.

The Good

The Good thing about Hummingbird is that it is designed for humans not computers, and typical laymen at that. We humans have the tendency to speak in long sentences, we don’t say specific keywords when talking to a friend or replying to our boss on an email, we just use the words that make the most sense to us at that moment.

But going back to Google Search, writing a big sentence would exponentially change the search results from something very useful to nothing but garbage. That’s why, when searching, we tend to break our sentences in fewer words and some keywords, too so we can get the search results the way we want to. You didn’t write “so my computer has started to hang. I installed a few software, is it because of that? How can I make it work smoothly again?”. Although if you were asking this question to another human, say your nerdy computer genius friend, this is exactly how you’d ask them. Writing the quoted sentence in Google wouldn’t give you any useful result or perhaps any result at all. Well, not any more.

Hummingbird has been designed to address the very same issue: i.e. understanding human language, convert them into mathematical algorithms in order to find the most relevant search result. Google wants you to talk to its search engine as if you’re asking your friend to help. With the ability to search using voice, imagine how weird it would be to tap on your phone and say, “solution computer hang.” I mean, seriously! The awesome news is, you don’t have to do that. Hummingbird is running inside Google Search for a few months now and it is going to understand and respond to your queries, the way a query is supposed to be answered.

Sweet but how would it affect my business?

Right on point, there. Well, there’s no major way Hummingbird is going to affect your rankings and eventually your business.

As I stated above, Hummingbird was designed to target complex queries to Google Search. Google understands that changing the core ranking algorithm would make all SEO gurus around the globe all nuts for rankings and whatnot. So the folks at Google did not touch the core algorithm responsible for calculating pagerank. Awesome, right?

It would, however, minimize the effect of those keywords your SEO guru has asked you to put in the meta tag of your website. Apart from that, it is not going to mess up the rankings you spent so much time and effort to achieve. So, relax. And give complex querying a shot on Google Search.