What Motivated Google’s Hummingbird Update?

When Google announced that its Hummingbird update had come into effect, the most common question…along with the usual voicing of profanity…was why – why did they implement such a monumental change?Are they trying to move the goalposts just for the sake of it, or is there a genuinely important reason for the update?     Well, to summarize Hummingbird in a nutshell, it is really all about complex and specific web searches. Google has from the very early days been largely devoted to returning the most accurate and relevant results for all searches carried out in accordance with what the user in question needs. After all, Google’s very existence relies on the people that are making the searches, so in order to keep said people on-side, improvements must always be made to keep results both accurate and ahead of the game.Hummingbird is quite simply another step toward delivering the kind of results web users have been looking for all along - it isn’t about destroying businesses as some seem to have convinced themselves.Conversational Search TermsThink of it this way – if you were to ask a person where you could eat for cheap on Oxford Street, that’s exactly what you’d ask them. You wouldn’t just say “Restaurants London” as you might enter into a search engine – the latter has just become a common habit as dictated by the way online search works. Well, Google for one is trying its best to head more in the direction of the conversational/human search term, in order to answer questions more specifically as if they had been asked to a human being. It’s still early days, but longer search terms are already taking over as the most important by far.Accurate and LocalWhy bother with all this? Simple really – a search for “Restaurants London” will return literally thousands of potentially viable results covering hundreds of square miles – 99% of which the searcher has no use for. The more specific search on the other hand may return no more than a dozen or so – 100% of which are of use to the searcher. The potential benefit therefore extends to both the person carrying out the search and the business – both of which come out of the deal with precisely what it is that they need.The Mobile Movement One of the main reasons why conversational search terms are becoming so much more important is the on-going exodus away from desktop computers in favour of smartphone and tablet PCs. Voice command use is becoming more and more popular by the day and because human beings naturally speak search phrases with more complexity than if they were to write them, this is what Google and Co. are focusing on for the future of search. So whether you favour the SEO outsource approach or prefer to look after marketing efforts in-house, it could not be of greater importance to understand what has to be addressed to cope with the mass shift to mobile already taking place.