
Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algorithm, “Hummingbird” - mumbi
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/google-recently-made-a-silent-shift-to-a-new-search-algorithm-hummingbird/
======
bane
I've noticed that I often just started asking google questions instead of
trying to assemble a sequence of words that I think will divine the results
I'm looking for.

It's always worked reasonably well and saves me from trying to come up with a
search.

At the same time I've noticed that coming up with a sequence of search terms
has been working worse and worse in google over the last couple years. I
frequently get results for whatever google thinks I was searching for,
especially if my original search terms resulted in very few results or no
results, I'll just get a result page anyway _except it 's almost never
helpful_.

Perhaps this is an attempt to make Google more Star-Trek/Watson-like, and it's
great for those use-cases. But for the other cases, like looking up specific
serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess.

~~~
cromwellian
If you want to search for a specific string, force it by putting quotes around
it, e.g. "376718578383"

~~~
ecuzzillo
It often gets completely ignored.

~~~
shamshiel
Yup, there have been plenty of times I've put quotes around my search terms
and Google decided I didn't really mean to put quotes around them.

~~~
nimble
What do you think Google should do with the following search:

    
    
       Who said, "To hair is human?"

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mkr-hn
I would want Google to leave it alone and suggest what it thinks is correct as
an option, like it used to.

~~~
nimble
I'd rather see:

    
    
      exact: Who said, "To hair is human?"
    

Quotes are too easy to be used accidentally by laymen.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Shift+2 just slips in their typing without any intention?

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obilgic
I operate 2 websites that are exact clones of each others, the only difference
is the domain. This algorithm change literally shifted %70 of the traffic from
one of them to the other one, in a matter of hours.

Edit:

    
    
        * Links to the websites, I would say almost identical
        * Same number of the pages are indexed by google, around ~5 million
        * Domains are almost same, no keyword difference
        * They both have same pagerank
        * Domains are registered together
        * Sites are hosted on different ips
        * Total traffic sites get is around ~40k/day unique
        * By this change, total unique increased by %10

~~~
rossjudson
Sounds like the algorithm noticed the duplication, and picked a "winner". The
new winner isn't the same as the old one.

~~~
boomzilla
While we are on this topic, does anyone know the current state of art for text
duplication detection algos? I understand that Google used LSH but they must
have made a lot of progress since.

LSH: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-
sensitive_hashing](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locality-sensitive_hashing)

~~~
rossjudson
I'm not sure about the algorithm in use, but I what I hope is happening is
that Google is now looking for the earliest publication of content when
deduplicating. Most copycat sites have to copy their text from something
existing, and if Google has already indexed that, they know that later
versions of it are copies (and can presumably be knocked down in rank).

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wehadfun
It seems to work:

Where is disneyland - Shows a map and has "Get Directions"
[https://www.google.com/#q=where+is+disneyland](https://www.google.com/#q=where+is+disneyland)

How big is disneyland - 160 acres
[https://www.google.com/#q=how+big+is+disneyland](https://www.google.com/#q=how+big+is+disneyland)

~~~
alayne
[https://www.google.com/search?q=how+did+walt+disney+die](https://www.google.com/search?q=how+did+walt+disney+die)

~~~
turing
That's cool, haven't seen this one before. Thanks for sharing :) Played around
with it a bit, and it seems to have pretty good coverage; got everyone from
Frederick Douglas to Dijkstra.

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nostromo
If people use your product all day, everyday, and you release the biggest
overhaul of your product in 4 years, and nobody notices, is that a good thing,
or a bad thing?

It makes me wonder if Google has become so "good enough" that more and more
engineering effort will be spent for smaller and smaller returns.

~~~
bane
Playing devil's advocate, they say in movies that the best special effects are
the ones you don't notice at all.

~~~
baddox
I think that's more applicable to less obvious things like the audio
production in a film.

~~~
chc
It applies to a lot of special effects too. Many — probably most — special
effects are striving to look organic. For example, did you notice that half of
Titanic was shot in front of a green screen? Were the special effects in the
Adventures of Superman TV series better because their chromakey work was more
noticeable?

It isn't that the special effect doesn't have an impact, but that you don't
specifically notice the effect because it blends seamlessly into the rest of
the film.

~~~
JonnieCache
Oh, it goes a lot deeper than that my friend. It's now normal for standard-
issue comedies and dramas to be chroma keyed, comped, etc:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhN1STep_zk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhN1STep_zk)

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TheBiv
This is going to be not good news for SEO people that just have affiliate ads
and used to do things like Celebrity Net Worth bc now the user does not have
to click on their site as Google will give them the answer they need.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Google are infringing the content creators copyright in such circumstances.

~~~
kstrauser
Facts aren't copyrightable.

~~~
M2Ys4U
But collections of facts _can_ be (or, at least, protected under a monopoly
that is copyright-like)

------
rossjudson
The shift to answering questions becomes really important over the longer
term, and people shift to using voice as a means of interacting with the net.

Dictated queries are going to come as natural language, not query syntax.

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pearjuice
I remember building websites for the Internet back in the day. Now, all we do
is building websites for Google as it became the main entrance of the
Internet.

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hrktb
So it means a lot more words will be parsed as highlighters (like 'how to' or
'where is') of one or more main search terms. I see the big usability leap it
will be for very everyday life, natural searches. At the same time the list of
almost non searchable terms will be growing so much.

I dread the day I'll have to look for some satiric blog called something like
'how to not' but I won't be sure enough about the exact terms to allow me to
search verbatim.

It feels like there's an expanding dark space in the shadow of bright neons.

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lylemckeany
I'm speculating that this change is the result of analyzing their users'
behavior. Over the past couple of years I made a switch to asking questions,
especially when trying to figure out some obscure Excel code I needed or
something like that. I almost always found some forum response that would
answer my question relatively quickly. I'm curious to see how this change will
effect the results compared to my past experience. This might prove to be a
boon for sites like Quora, as well.

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pmtarantino
Funny story (at least for me): When I was 13, I wrote a letter to Google to
implement this because my mom used to search like this, entire sentences. I
also remember I attached an algorithm of how they should do it - rewriting the
sentences into separate and useful keywords.

~~~
cfaftw
Did they send a reply?

~~~
pmtarantino
Nope, never.

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ChuckMcM
I've been watching this ever since I noticed the a/b testing. One of the side
effects is that you bounce off the Google page rather than click through to
some page. Google got into some trouble for this with currency exchanges (the
calculator would auto calculate currency conversions) But they seem to have
worked around that complaint (type in x dollars in y currency to see a 'one
box' type answer).

I wish I could see how it affects their AdSense revenue. (a lot of 'answer'
sites are just AdSense landing pages)

At what point does it take all the load off the Wikipedia servers if it just
serves up the answer on the page :-)

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agumonkey
<digression-disclaimer/>

There are many things that I think should be google-time-worthy:

\- mail notifier as a first class citizen, a tiny dot would be a time saver

\- many of their urls are 256+ chars in size ... , I'd love parseable urls
that fit in a 1024 width browser bar

\- no more link hijack on the front page, they surely know how to do it
without rewriting the link on click ... or at least propose a quick way to
select the original url shown below (a web semantic-unit/best-practice since
long)

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tokenadult
I just had to ask, "How has Google changed its search algorithm?" and that
produced some interesting results, with not all of the results being about the
latest change.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=How+has+Google+changed+its+s...](https://www.google.com/search?q=How+has+Google+changed+its+search+algorithm)

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ucha
As we search more on mobile devices, the way we interact with a search engine
changed. Just look at Siri. It may not be a ground breaking technology now but
we're slowing moving to making more and more voice controlled search requests.
Some of these requests are better answered by Wolfram Alpha than Google.

During the past decade, Wikipedia emerged as the primary source of high
quality organized digital knowledge. This, together with the open data policy
practiced at may governmental agencies, supplied search engines with
quantitative data easy to process and understand.

For the next few years, this looks like the biggest change in search engine
technology to expect. We are going to switch from mathematically precise
queries and semantic processing of the search corpus to a semantic processing
of the queries and a reliance on more quantitative data sources.

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mkr-hn
People have used increasingly longer, more specific search queries over the
years, either through Google's efforts or through people learning to make use
of search engines. This is the logical next step since people were always
asking questions of Google, even if people didn't always realize it.

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grexi
Well, the article says it's in place for a longer period of time - we see a
major organic traffic growth from Google on
[https://usersnap.com](https://usersnap.com) and many search result entries
popped from page 2 to page 1 (and thus leading to clicks).

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danso
That's interesting...For the longest time, the .org domain that has my name,
but that I haven't updated in at least 3 years (and has no real content), was
almost always on the first result of Google searches for my name. Now it's
nowhere to be seen

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joeblau
The change is interesting. It's making me re-think the description/title of my
site if this algorithm is based on serving up the answer to questions. I have
noticed that my traffic has dropped a little so I might not be targeting
correctly.

~~~
themodelplumber
If you rethink the description/title, you'll probably be inclined rethink the
way you write the articles themselves. It makes me wonder if we'll see a
change from "good writing" to "quick, digestible nuggets of information served
without nuance" that's even more striking than the current content landscape.
When Google makes strong decisions like this, it really opens up the playing
field to others who have different ideas and may not even need to court
advertisers.

~~~
joeblau
In my case, it's not an article, it's just a single page that is a web
utility. I just went on google insights to see what people are searching for
and the keywords in my title aren't optimal. I'm just going to reformat my
title based on answering a question instead.

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justin123
I think, This is not end of the SEO but it's very difficult to get traffic for
new website by seo. As new search engine's algorithm back link value is zero.
But Content should be unique and informational.

------
known
I think "miserable failure" is the root cause of Hummingbird.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure](https://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure)

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lucb1e
Not silent for me. I was wondering what happened to the use of keyword search,
it seems to work less well nowadays. Only phrase searches still give great
results...

------
taopao
Consult the SEO chicken bones.

------
bsullivan01
Google is becoming the portals they railed against in early 2000. Their
problem is that natural growth has all but stopped so Google is trying to keep
as many people as possible in their properties hoping the click on an ad
eventually. King Larry cannot face Wall Street and admit that Google needs to
be treated as a money making giant but not as wildly growing one, so he's
riding Google to the ground.

What's wrong with answering questions and offering everything under the sun?
Because another site might have better answers and offering but Google's MBAs
will make sure that page is buried down below--unless they advertise.

"Best for the users" has been replaced with "best for this quarter's
earnings," and it's just a matter of time before it catches up with Google.
Google criticism was barely existent just 2-3 years ago, now it's widespread.
What else will they do to prop up their earnings??? On what can you trust
them?

~~~
awj
Is it baseless assumption Thursday? What evidence do you have to support any
of this?

~~~
bsullivan01
_What evidence do you have to support any of this?_

How about you tell me line by line where I'm wrong? Beware that I do this for
a living, I help manage quite a few small business sites and know this first
hand. I also follow Google's stock and earnings reports. You should read
Patrick Pichette's comments about their low CPC and how ad clicks increased by
double digits. It's obvious that Search will hand more penalties this quarter
to more sites, hoping they advertise and help increase CPC along the way.

~~~
lelandbatey
I believe that the burden of proof lies with you and your original claims, not
with those that doubt you. We're not saying you're wrong, but we are saying
we'd like to know more. Can you please provide us with resources so we can get
familiar with the information behind what you have to say?

~~~
bsullivan01
Fine. Where am I wrong? What claim needs to be supported?

Obviously you don't expect a secret email or memo, we deduce from their
actions and results.

~~~
jlgreco
Sigh:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophic_burden_of_proof)

Obviously nobody is expecting a leaked memo or something, but an explanation
of which actions and what results you are talking about would be nice, since
you _are_ the one making claims.

~~~
bsullivan01
So tell me, what claim needs to be supported? I am not going to sit here and
write 1000 words for each word I used to try to convince you.

