HOW GOOGLE HUMMINGBIRD UPDATE STARTED THE SEMANTIC SEARCH REVOLUTION
September 16th, 2013 was a a watershed day in the history of search marketing, as Google dropped its Google Hummingbird Bombshell on its knowledge graph as it announced that Google hummingbird was live and its search algorithm undergone a dramatic makeover.
When hummingbird flew in, the old way of just matching up strings of characters in a search query just went out of window. With its Hummingbird update Google changed its core prowess from strings to things and in the process it changed google from a search engine to a knowledge engine
The Need For Semantic Search:All search engines compete among themselves to keep their search keywords more relevant and in tune with users actual intent. While a users input device might increase 10 times or 20 times, their intent does not change.. For any search engine its true test starts and begins with user intent as it tries to understand the query itself and not only just the keywords and in the query. Once a semantic search engine understands the context and relevance..it will throw up the same results and meanings of their words as humans do
For example a search query "what is the height of Barrack Obama", a conventional search engines will try to bring up pages which may have " stories on Obama, height of something, which might or might not have any connection to Obama, news on American Presidents". This
is a typical machine to machine learning in progress
However by bringing on the human element ..where one user asks the other .. whats the height of Barrack Obama..Its being made amply clear that we are interested to know the height of the American President. This conversation is now aided by semantics
In terms of semantic search, The Hummingbird update takes the small but a significant step towards bridging the gap between machine led learning to human based learning. The best example of how Hummingbird update finally manages to bridge the semantic gap is this example shown below
A search for “pizza hut calories per slice” used to list an answer like this, Google said, but not one from Pizza Hut. However Now, after the Google Hummingbird update it lists this answer directly from Pizza Hut itself, Google says.
Google Hummingbird has been the precursor to start the first Semantic search revolution. Semantic search technology seeks to extract entities from its databases as answers and displays personalised results based on the individuals personal browsing habits
Hummingbird and Voice Search: Hummingbird paved the way for voice search by ability to search by speaking your query into search engine using a smartphone . The ability of the the search engine to understand spoken search queries by users intent and contextual meaning which are today used in spoken conversation is an perfect application of using semantic technology across search engines .
Imagine being able to talk to your computer the same way you talk to your friend.
"Hey I saw this awesome Oscar nominated bridge of spies.movie.. Why dont you watch it too? do you want me to find out wheres it playing at NJ "?
Semantic search is revolutionizing how people search because they can not merely interact by keywords but in conversational line . With mobile penetration burning up all records.. Voice based search is set to grow in numbers that will defy all expectations
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