Let me start by making a pr!iction: this will upset a lot of Marketers out there. Google just announc! last week that it will implement a new search algorithm call! Hummingbird. The change is so radical that it’s simply Google’s most dramatic change since 2001. It is a replacement rather than a mere update such as their previous Panda and Penguin updates.
So what is Hummingbird?
Let’s say you’re looking for “What’s the best way to bake a Vegan cake?”. Now, if you were using a traditional search engine, it would try to match results with individual words such as “vegan cake” or “best” or “bake”.
With Hummingbird, Google would essentially broaden its search engine’s focus on the meaning of your search. It would pay more attention to the meaning of the sentence rather than the individual words. So for example it might know of vegan cookbooks in bookstores locat! near you (if you’ve made your location public) or search for interesting blogs that deal with the topic.
Try and see Hummingbird as a more holistic kind of search. It focuses on the whole rather than the specific, while at the same time paying even more attention to the specific, usa whatsapp number data 5 million ensuring a much more interesting search result. In the end, you’ve got a list of pages matching the meaning of your query (the whole setence), rather than part of it (words).
Not bad huh? But if the change is so positive
Why are some Marketers angry?
Well, by misunderstanding what Hummingbird is, mostly. Google isn’t trying to make the web less business-friendly. That part should be obvious. Thing is, some commentators are speculating that Google is trying to provide ‘extra-protection’ to its users, after accusations that it’s been giving information to the NSA (which it strongly denies). It start! encrypting search results back in October 2011, meaning that impact on the business itself marketers would no longer be able to know what keywords were Googl! before arriving at your website, as Hubspot explains. But since the new change affects everything except ad clicks, some have suggest! that Google is trying to get more people to use AdWords.
While Google assur! that only 10% of search ao lists results would be affect!, word got out pretty quickly that the percentage was much higher, and rising. In November 2011, Hubspot notic! that around 11% of organic search traffic was encrypt!, and in January 2013, around 55% of organic search was affect!, and the percentage kept on rising (by about 4% each month).
As you can see in the following figure, shar! by HubSpot, things seem to be getting pretty serious.