Hummingbird: Google Rewrites Search Algorithm

Hummingbird: Google Rewrites Search Algorithm
On Thursday, Google had a press event to announce new changes they have been working on in search, as well discuss the progression over the 15 years of their existence.
Part of that was to announce that they have rewrote their search algorithm for the first time in about twelve-years. They call it Hummingbird.

Hummingbird is just what they code-named the rewrite. The algorithm itself is almost the same, but I assume cleaned up and rewritten to be faster and more accurate. 

Google said they rolled it out about a month ago, according to Danny Sullivan, "Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today."
I suspect that is what we've been seeing with the 9/12, 9/4 and 8/24 possible updates that Google would not confirm. Of course, I can be wrong and it can be unrelated but it does seem very suspicious that Google would not give me anything on the record and then this was announced, overlapping those three updates.

I scanned all the forum threads on the topic and learned nothing more than what Danny had in his article. I did however spot one thread at Hacker News where Google's Ryan Moulton is taking feedback on bad example search results.

The main thing, the Hummingbird algorithm is major but Google did not want or expect anyone to notice it. I think we did notice it back earlier this month and/or late last month. Google will not confirm that. If you think you noticed something this weekend, it is not Hummingbird directly related.

Author: Barry Schwartz