Google has been busy rolling out changes to its system this year. The search engine giant is not resting on its laurels and letting newcomers pave their way. They will surely innovate and improve their systems, even though a lot will be affected by it.
Take for example the Panda and the Penguin updates which has penalized not only small players in the digital marketing industry but also big sites who has violated the practices of Google. But lo and behold, a new update has been released and somehow prove to be as important as the other animal-name updates: the tiny but special Hummingbird.
The animal Hummingbird is the smallest bird and the only bird that can fly backwards. The update is equally ambitious as well.
The new search algorithm is aimed in increasing “natural” search strings in the search bar. How natural? More like a normal human thought and speaking process.
The major thing about it is that Google aims to be more voice friendly with the latest boom in voice technologies and the advent of the personal assistant Siri. They are foreseeing the future to be voice enabled and treating the Google device like Jeeves who hands to you all the information you direly need.
Let me illustrate to you examples which might make your understanding a bit clearer.
I search for “Mercedes Benz Singapore” on my phone and the company website pops out including advertisements and random blogs, videos and all. But what I really need it the prices of the C-class models that they have. So I would just type instead of “Mercedes Benz Singapore C-class price”.
But we all know that we don’t tell the salesman on the phone “Mercedes Benz Singapore C-class price”. That is what Google is aiming.
So we instead say “What is the price of C-class Mercedes Benz in Singapore?” and from that Google collates the relevant searches and weeds out the vague search terms which are inserted in the website.
Google is weeding out the sites who have no useful content in this process. Brilliant, right? Just by using the search terms in the natural language, the search giant will be able to detect the algorithm of the natural language which could be applied on the pages which will be crawled.
But wait there is more.
Hummingbird also recalls your previous search queries which will be useful if you’re using it for a string of research and the use of the immense Knowledge graph which can compare side by side two search queries.
As a marketer, there is nothing to be afraid of Hummingbird. The update will only be for the improvement of the search engine and will rake in relevant visitors to your website. Just always update your keywords and keep you content useful and even human.
