Google marked its fifteenth birthday yesterday, and used the occasion to tell us something rather more interesting than a party. It has rebuilt the core of its search algorithm, and given the new engine a name: Hummingbird. What caught my ear is that Google says this has been running for about a month already, and most of us did not notice, which tells you something about how carefully it was done.
I wrote here only a few weeks ago about the sense that search was drifting from matching keywords towards understanding meaning. Well, here it is, with a name on it.
The clearest way I have heard it explained is that Hummingbird is about understanding the whole query, the full question, rather than fixating on the individual words in it. Google gave the example of longer, conversational searches, the sort of thing people increasingly speak into their phones. Ask “where can I buy an iPhone near here” and the old approach would grind away at the keywords; the new one is meant to grasp that you want a shop, nearby, that sells the thing, and answer accordingly.
Two points are worth being clear about, because there is already a fair bit of noise.
First, this is not a Panda or a Penguin. Those were updates that hunted for problems and pushed offending sites down. Hummingbird is a rewrite of the underlying engine, changing how queries get interpreted across the board. There is no penalty to recover from here and, if you have been doing sensible work, probably nothing to fix.
Second, because it has been live for a month with barely a ripple, most decent sites will not have felt a thing. If your traffic has been steady through September, that is your answer. Google clearly went to some trouble to make the change without upending everyone’s rankings.
So what, if anything, should you actually do? My view is not very much, at least not as a panic reaction. The direction this confirms is the one worth planning for. Content that genuinely answers people’s questions, in plain language, covering a topic properly rather than chasing a single phrase, is exactly what an engine built to understand questions wants to surface. The old habit of writing a thin page for every slight variation of a keyword looks even less clever than it did last week.
I would keep an eye on the searches that bring people to you and notice how many are turning into full questions rather than clipped phrases. That trend is the practical thing to track over the coming months, and it will tell you more about what Hummingbird means for your site than any amount of theorising will.
