Google this week announced one of the biggest changes to its search engine - a rewriting of its algorithm to handle more complex queries that affects 90 percent of all searches. Calling it Hummingbird, the technological update of Google search is designed to handle more complex queries.
Announcing it as the culmination of 15 years of work, the news was revealed by Amit Singhal, Google's senior VP, one day before Google officially celebrates its 15th birthday.
The company made the changes, executives said, because Google users are asking increasingly long and complex questions and are searching Google more often on mobile phones with voice search.
The algorithm builds on work Google has done to understand conversational language, like interpreting what pronouns in a search query refer to, and doesn’t so much change the way Google searches the Web, but how it displays the results.
Few other specifics were revealed about the changes, but announcers did say that the new algorithm allows Google to more quickly parse full questions (as opposed to parsing searches word-by-word), and to identify and rank answers to those questions from the content they’ve indexed.
