Google marked its fifteenth anniversary on Thursday with a revision its search engine algorithm called “Hummingbird”.
Google updates its search algorithm frequently, on the order of several hundred times a year. The changes produced by most of these adjustments tend to be too subtle to notice. But the company gives names only to its major architectural updates.
The Hummingbird update expands Google’s use of its Knowledge Graph, introduced last year as a way to help its search engine understand the relationships between concepts rather than simply matching keywords in documents. So its search engine can provide answers to queries that don’t necessarily have simple answers.
The Knowledge Graph also helps Google understand when a follow-up search makes reference to a previous search. For example, if you ask the Google for “pictures of the Washington Monument” and then ask, “How tall is it?”, Google will understand that you’re referring to the Washington Monument instead of treating your query as a separate question.
The search update also adds a comparison tool. For example, the query “Compare butter with olive oil” returns an organised set of data covering nutritional information.
