Eric Enge, Copyblogger
On October 3rd, 2013 Google announced a major search algorithm release called Hummingbird.
Uh-oh.
Does this mean your content-driven business is in jeopardy? Is keyword research dead? Are you going to have to re-engineer your entire content strategy?There’s no question that the Hummingbird algorithm is only the beginning of change in search optimization, but smart content creators can be prepared to thrive in this — and any — environment that may come in the future.
This release is basically a platform that enables Google to better handle “conversational” search queries. With the growth of mobile use, and its less than ideal keyboard, more and more searches are conducted using voice recognition. And it’s this new syntax that changes the game for content kings.
[Get] real speech patterns
Having the best platform for processing conversational queries is where Hummingbird fits in, though it’s just the beginning of a long process.Think of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm as a two-year-old child. So far it’s learned a few very basic concepts.
These concepts represent building blocks, and it is now possible to teach it even more concepts going forward. It appears that a lot of this learning is derived from the rich array of information that Google has on all search queries done on the web, including the query sequences.
It is important to remember that this step forward being described by Google as a new platform. And like the Caffeine release Google did in June of 2010, the real import of this is yet to come. Google will be able to implement many more capabilities in the future. The implications to search in the long term are potentially huge.
For publishers however, the implications are more straightforward. Check out where content needs to head in the world of Hummingbird
