Google Hummingbird Update: What’s so different?
Google has been updating its algorithms over the past several months. It has come up with algorithms like Panda, Penguin and others. These algorithm updates were meant to improve user’s experience. However, Google’s Hummingbird in not just an update but altogether a new algorithm which was announced during Google’s 15th birthday celebration. Hummingbird affects 90 per cent of all searches. The interesting part is that Google launched Hummingbird almost a month ago before the announcement.
Google’s previous updates were more focused towards making Google better at gathering information by identifying Spam content or poor back-links. Hummingbird, on the other hand, is focused on making user’s experience better by understanding their queries and providing them with better answers.
Google has taken into account two big factors while launching Hummingbird algorithm. First, the long search queries entered by users instead of just few keywords. Second, the growing trend of mobile search queries. Rather than showing results based on few words in the search query, Google is aiming to understand meaning behind the whole sentence entered by users. This means Google will now focus on context of the search query and will try to understand the intent of the user in order to deliver more relevant and better results. We can say that Google has made search human friendly by understanding language of the users. Let’s suppose a user wants to know “Best restaurants in New York”. Earlier Google would have displayed results for all the keywords separately like Wikipedia page, some map results based on location or some other websites with keywords ‘Restaurants’, ‘New York’. With Hummingbird update these results will be refined further and will display exactly what user is looking for i.e. the list of restaurants in New York.
The other driving force behind this update is the growing trend of mobile search queries. While making searches on their Smartphones, users tend to enter shorter queries. However, this trend is reversed when user uses voice search option. Voice search queries are longer and conversational. Google also aims to ensure that they provide the best voice search experience to its users.
Now the question arises how can ZMOT marketers use this opportunity to reap its benefits? Well, the answer is to use strategic marketing techniques which are in accord with the Google’s Hummingbird policy. In fact, this is good news for content marketers who can now create content for specific questions which users enter.
If ZMOT marketers create the kind of content their audience is looking for, the new algorithm will help them find marketers easily. That’s why Hummingbird is a win for the customers as well as for ZMOT marketers.