Hummingbird, a revolution?

Google search turned 15 at the end of September (Happy birthday again) and at this occasion they released their new algorithm, Hummingbird, and a blog article explaining the revolution behind this evolution.

So after all, what are the changes, the visible changes? The main change is the that now, you can ask Google a full question as a query and it will (or try at least) to answer it . For example you can ask "Who is X" and it will tell you. It doesn't seem much like that, but it is outstanding.

Google owns its outstanding results to something called form-based queries , that is combined with  “overlay” (natural language) to give you the answer you are looking for. We tried it asking "Who is Bob Marley?"

So from now on, we can ask Google the same way we ask anybody else. Where is this, what is that, what happened here in 1789 and so on. But there is more.

We can ask Google to compare things for us, like what is better, olive oil or butter and it will tell you. We ask it:

And of course it works also on Mobile and Tablets. All that is possible because of the "Knowledge graph" of Google  Search. It evolved in 15 years, from a simple syntax corrector ( "did you mean....") to an intelligent entity that can recognize full questions and moderate which ones are more adapted than other. I strongly recommend to read the Google Timeline graph showing the evolution of this search engine, it is pretty remarkable.

So what is so revolutionary? By changing the way people ask things on Google, you change the search system itself, and SEO campaigns will need to take this new format into account. Search results haven't been affected too much yet.

The second result of this new algorithm, linked to Social Media, is the place given to Google+.  On our example with Bob Marley, you can see that the Google + page takes half of the screen, with pictures and details, when the Facebook page (that counts 50,205,334 likes) is not showing on the first page. We cannot make any conclusion for the moment, but we surely recommend to our clients to strengthen their Google+ page.

Take it EZ