The search algorithm swap puts a lot more emphasis on meaning and not keywords

Oct 3, 2013 10:21 GMT  ·  By

Last week Google unveiled a brand new search ranking algorithm dubbed Hummingbird, since it's "fast and precise." Algorithm updates, even named ones, have become common these days, but Hummingbird is one of the biggest in more than a decade. In fact, Google says the last time it did a complete algorithm swap was probably in 2001.

This brand new algorithm uses components from the old one, but only things which were useful and relevant to the web today were kept. All in all, it's a big change.

But, even if it announced the algorithm last week, Hummingbird has been live and powering Google searches for more than a month and the web hasn't crumbled.

Despite this, Google says the changes are quite big and that 90 percent of searches are affected by it. What's more, it also says that results, overall, should be better.

That's hard to judge and only Google is in a position to make a comparison at this point, as there's no way for the rest of us to use the old algorithm anymore. But it should be clear by now that things at least aren't worse.

So, what has really changed in Hummingbird? Well, not a lot and everything. Not a lot because, Google says, the same things that were important before are important now. The guidelines remain exactly the same: make good content that people want to read. Google has just become better at recognizing that good content.

What has changed though is the focus on keywords. Specifically, Google puts a lot more emphasis on the meaning behind a query, each word in it as well as all of them taken together, rather than on a few keywords. That seems like an obvious thing to focus on, but Google is only now capable of understanding what you meant by your query, particularly a natural language query.

This too has been a gradual change. Google introduced the Knowledge Graph last year, to give meaning to words. With Hummingbird, Google can understand, at least at a basic level, the meaning of the entire web, i.e. what every page is about, and every query. Keywords were born out of necessity and Google is finally ready to move beyond them.

This is a fundamental shift and a first big step towards the Star Trek computer that Google hopes to one day emulate. It's no coincidence that this change comes just as mobile devices become increasingly popular.

Google itself has been pushing users towards voice search and natural language queries. These queries, conversational search as the company calls them, are now better served by Google search even if they don't relate to topics covered by the ever-expanding Knowledge Graph.

For the time being though, don't expect any groundbreaking changes in the way people search or in the results. This is just laying the groundwork. Results will get better thanks to Hummingbird, but it will take time.