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Google Recently Made A Silent Shift To A New Search Algorithm, “Hummingbird”
- bane 13y agoI'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 13y agoIf you want to search for a specific string, force it by putting quotes around it, e.g. "376718578383"
- ecuzzillo 13y agoIt often gets completely ignored.
- shamshiel 13y agoYup, 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 13y agoWhat do you think Google should do with the following search: Who said, "To hair is human?"
- mkr-hn 13y agoI would want Google to leave it alone and suggest what it thinks is correct as an option, like it used to.
- chimeracoder 13y agoWow. I was definitely not expecting this: http://i.imgur.com/9Zpqota.png http://i.imgur.com/9Zpqota.png Thanks for pointing that out.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoThat's a massive fail for Google IMO. Why isn't it matching phrases for the search recommendation? Surely "to err is human" popularised by Pope [a million plus results] should be suggested before "to heir is human" (a minor computer game) [60k results].
- nl 13y agoInteresting! "heir" is a much closer match for "hair" in terms of Levenshtein distance[1] (which indicates a typing error) and soundex[2] (misheard). But clearly "to err is human" should be offered as a possibility too. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex
- JTon 13y agoI only recall it being ignored when the string in quotes returns no hits
- adanto6840 13y agoI get a lot of "Showing results for X instead" when searching for model numbers or similar. Usually you can click "search for {what I actually typed}" but it's still annoying. I liked it when +'s and double-quotes consistently did the same thing every time. Maybe there is a setting that does this still? I've tried playing with a few settings but have had mixed results / consistency...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- moultano 13y agoIf that happens it's a bug, and I'd love to have some examples to pass along. I'll make sure they get to the right people. Looking through your search history: https://history.google.com/history/ https://history.google.com/history/ might help you find them.
- ecuzzillo 13y agoUnrelatedly terrible results: https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+ros+pcl+download+hangs+forever&oq=mac+ros+pcl+downlo&aqs=chrome.4.69i57j69i60l3j69i59j0.5635j0&sourceid=chrome&espvd=210&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=mac+ros+pcl+download+hangs+f...
- moultano 13y agoAre these results better? https://www.google.com/search?q=ros+pcl+download+hangs+mac https://www.google.com/search?q=ros+pcl+download+hangs+mac
- lbenes 13y agoI really miss the + operator in Google searches. Back when Google disabled it to make their Google+ easier to search for, someone posted some good examples of where " " fails to reproduce the + search behavior.
- rcavezza 13y agoIs that different from using a capital "AND"?
- sp332 13y agoCompletely different. It's a unitary literal operator, so if you put +shelf you would only get pages that had the word "shelf" and not shelved, shelving, bookcase, etc like you get normally.
- cynwoody 13y agoI thought they got rid of the + operator a couple of years ago, recommending instead that you surround the formerly plussed word with quotes or use the Verbatim option under Search Tools. However, I just tried a search for "anagram +python" and got 67 results vs 139,000 without the plus-sign. Does that mean they quietly restored the operator?
- criley2 13y agoI haven't tried the "+" operator in a while but I know the "-" operator has continued to work. I always use it to filter out commercial or store results when a query triggers some over-zealous SEO and throws up pages of junk. A quick "-buy" or "-store" usually cleans the results up.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoI find now that the minus operator doesn't work half the time either. Google results are getting worse and worse IMO and there don't appear to be any tools left in the available query language to rectify it.
- bfish510 13y agoalso use - and + to force or remove certain results. (You can use this to limit areas of a website for example)
- angersock 13y agoYou're making me miss alta-vista. :(
- curveship 13y ago- still works, but they removed + a couple (few?) years ago. Instead, they recommend you put the single term in quotes, so a search for 'linux +powerpc' would now be 'linux "powerpc"'.
- cynwoody 13y agoThat, and they also have the Verbatim option under Search Tools, but using it seems to conflict with other Tools, such as date filtering, and also applies to the whole query, not just one or two terms.
- cromwellian 13y agoWhy was this voted down? It is the correct answer for searching for serial numbers, for example an Adobe Photoshop serial number: "1325-1576-6224-7891-3222-6645"
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoThey've been messing with operators so much, I've lost track what works and what doesn't. Apparently the double-quote still works. Well, that's good.
- 6ren 13y agoAll is not lost! If you try their sample question, with quotes, it only turns up 4 results - with the article on top. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=“Which+is+better+for+me+—+olive+oil+or+butter%3F” https://www.google.com.au/search?q=“Which+is+better+for+me+—... But it seems inevitable that as google targets what most people mean, they will target less what niche people mean (us). They could do both, with explicit operators etc, but would double their indices, and not worth it (for them). :( At least it creates opportunity for the google-usurper.
- Amadou 13y agoDouble-quote is "sort of literal" (google will perform automatic stemming on single words in double quotes, but not on phrases) if you want really, really literal use "intext:" or "allintext:"
- contingencies 13y agoGood tip.
- celwell 13y agoyou can vote down on yc?
- porso9 13y agoYeah, people really need to know how to google effectively. You can also add "-" before a word to cut out results with that word. (example: "cats -dogs" will return searches with cats but take out ones that also include dogs.) Then there's "file:" and a file extension name to find searches of that filetype. (example: "AP biology file:ppt" returns all ap biology related powerpoints. Next there's "site:" and a website. (Example: "site:reddit.com fedoras" searches for fedoras on reddit, a very common thing. Useful if a site's search engine sucks.)
- the_watcher 13y agosite: is one of the more useful search operators I've discovered. It's almost always better than a site search button for me.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cynwoody 13y agoIn my experience, as a rule, site search engines generally suck. And the exceptions to the rule often turn out to be farming the search out to Google one way or another.[1][2] I often simply ignore site search boxes in favor of using the "site:" operator. [1]https://www.google.com/cse/ https://www.google.com/cse/ [2]http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gsa.html http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gsa.html
- ivanbrussik 13y agois file: different than filetype:
- eieio 13y agofile: doesn't appear to be a documented command, while filetype is [1] Searching for a few random queries with either "file:pdf" or "filetype:pdf" shows that both return pdfs, but the results that I get are different. Not sure what to make of that or which is better. [1] http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html
- ben0x539 13y agoI think the intention isn't for searching for literally that sequence of words, though, just something approximate-ish question-ish.
- reeddavid 13y agoGoogle often ignores quotes. I've had success using "intext:someword" (without quotes) to force Google to only return results that include someword.
- photorized 13y agoLoose matching = more revenue.
- SeanDav 13y agoQuotes can help but they are often ignored.
- photorized 13y agoThat doesn't always result in strict string matching with Google.
- lnanek2 13y agoSame here. I was struggling over some results a couple times today where I entered keywords and it seemed more like Google was trying to answer a question. Wish I could turn the new thing off. I don't use Google that way.
- codemac 13y agoThis is why I basically use DuckDuckGo for any search where I know exactly what terms I want to be super weighted, and Google for things like: "What is the weather in Amsterdam?" It's worked out really well. That plus the !g operator in ddg means I get the best of both worlds, I'd suggest you try it for a day or so and see how it goes.
- bumbledraven 13y agoTurning on Verbatim mode can help. To do this, after you search, go to Search Tools -> All Results -> Verbatim.
- SeanDav 13y agoGoogle is increasingly becoming an "Ask Jeeves" clone. I have very little control of my searches and Google just returns what it thinks I meant, rather than what I actually typed. I would love an advanced search mode with some simple boolean logic, even if it took several seconds to return the result, for those times when you really need to sift through a lot of garbage to find the results you really want. What is the point of Google returning results in 0.000000001 seconds if they aren't the results I wanted and I have very little means of refining the search. The moment a new search engine comes with this functionality and a decent indexed base, it's bye-bye Google for me.
- moultano 13y agoIf you have any example queries I'd love to debug them. You might find them here: https://history.google.com/history/ https://history.google.com/history/ if you have search history turned on.
- SeanDav 13y agoThat's great! I do not have search history turned on but will definitely find you some nice examples of what I mean going forward.
- stusmith1977 13y agoDoes "verbatim" mode approach what you need? Google won't attempt to guess what words it thought you meant in that mode.
- furyofantares 13y ago> 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. This is an interesting area where I found myself playing catch-up to the less technical people in my life. For a long time I saw them typing questions into google and getting bad results and my recommendation to use keywords never really stuck, probably because they didn't have the same mental model of how searching worked that I did. Then along came a few sites that targeted question-askers and sometimes if you asked a question you'd find someone else asking the same question along with some answers of high variable quality. I didn't discover this myself, because I never typed questions into google -- I had to see observe the less technical people getting better results than me occasionally to pick up on this. Still, they got worse results most of the time, and while it was a new tool in my arsenal, it wasn't usually what I was looking for and I used it sparingly. Then when the first iPhone with Siri came out, I bought it for a family member and demo'd it. I did all the stuff the commercial was doing to make it seem like magic. So my family member takes it and starts talking to it like it's a human. And I instantly regret what I've done, because I knew some keywords it would pick up on to look like magic, but I've made it look like you don't need to know the keywords, you just need to talk to it. So there they are, talking to it like a human, and I'm expecting it to fail. But instead, when they say "call my sister" it replies with a prompt asking who the sister is. I'm sure Siri is still a large number of special cases, but it's large enough that thinking of it that was failed me. Similarly, I noticed one day that people asking google questions were getting better results than me sometimes even when they weren't looking for other people asking/answering the same question. So I've started asking google questions more often, but again, it required me to observe a less technical person doing so.
- bane 13y ago> it required me to observe a less technical person doing so. That's a really fantastic observation. I suspect that lots of these changes are meant for those kinds of people (who happen to make up the majority of the world) and not for tech folks at all. But yeah, I notice that if I ask a question, quite often the results I get are on question asking sites like Stack Overflow -- it turns out I usually get very good results that way too ;)
- 13y ago
- agibsonccc 13y agoYou only need to look at google's knowledge graph alongside google now to see that that's where they're going. Many Question Answering Systems are able to handle many kinds of questions with relative accuracy now. With all of the different kinds of data sources out there, I'm not really surprised. That being said machine learning is far from perfect. Allowing for user correction is still an immense must. Let's hope basic search operators like quotes don't go away anytime soon.
- Zoomla 13y agoI have noticed the same and I am having more and more difficulty to find exactly what I want in the first result page. The disappearance of the minus and plus operators is probably the major reason for me not getting the results that I want. I wish the 1998 Google page that made the front page on HN was real (with updated index of course).
- Amadou 13y agoBut for the other cases, like looking up specific serial numbers or whatever, it's a mess. It is a boatload of extra typing, but the "allintext:" operator is your friend for those kinds of searches. I wish there was a URL modifier that could force google to assume allintext: on the search - that way I could have two different google search engines in firefox, one for literal and one for more "semiotic" searches. Maybe there is and I just don't know it? http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html#allintext http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html...
- NSAID 13y agoYou could set that up in Firefox. Create a keyword search for Google[1], and replace &q=%s in the link to &q=allintext:%s [1] http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-bar http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address-... EDIT: Looks like Chrome works in a similar manner: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95653 https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95653
- wehadfun 13y agoIt 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 13y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=how+did+walt+disney+die https://www.google.com/search?q=how+did+walt+disney+die
- turing 13y agoThat'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.
- riffraff 13y agoyesterday for the first time I noticed the inline translation e.g. "cat in portuguese" -> gato. Not sure if it's new.
- camus 13y agoyep , it works , i tried :"how tall is the eiffet tower?" gave me the result ( ~=324 meters). "What is PI?" shows me a calculator with the result.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rmckayfleming 13y agoGoogle has an interesting localization issue when it comes to Canada. If you ask it for someone's height, it gives it in metric, but everyone here uses imperial for body related measurements. The same goes for area, I hear acre a lot more than hectare, but "How big is disneyland" gives me 65ha.
- lylemckeany 13y agoI'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.
- TheBiv 13y agoThis 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 13y agoGoogle are infringing the content creators copyright in such circumstances.
- nostromo 13y agoIf 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.
- bsullivan01 13y agoIf 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? How do you know it was the "biggest overhaul"? Google is known to use every moment to hype itself. Also Google has been doing these changes since 2011 almost monthly. Now sites that sell things or make money have almost given up on "free" traffic from Google, they know it's pay to play (outside Product Search it's not openly pay-to-play but you get the message after a few 70% traffic reducing updates).
- drewjoh 13y agoThey were just quoting the article: "While they did say that this was the biggest overhaul to their engine since the 2009 “Caffeine” overhaul (which focused on speed and integrating social network results into search) and that it affects “around 90% of searches”, there wasn’t much offered in terms of technical details."
- ivanbrussik 13y agoPenguin .001% of search results - EVERYONE PANIC Hummingbird 90% of search results - No one cares
- agumonkey 13y agoSometimes the good things are the one you don't notice. Maybe they noticed an increase or different usage patterns on their side.
- niuzeta 13y ago
- grexi 13y agoWell, 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).
- bsullivan01 13y agoGoogle 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 13y agoIs it baseless assumption Thursday? What evidence do you have to support any of this?
- bsullivan01 13y agoWhat 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.
- dannyr 13y agoI could name at least 5 projects that Google is working now that is a long-term bet and doesn't care about quarterly earnings. I'm afraid that it would still not convince you otherwise.
- 13y ago
- obilgic 13y agoI 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
- DGCA 13y agoDo you have any guesses as to why?
- agumonkey 13y agogoogle used to care about matching domain and content, maybe it identified the 70% one as a more realistic name.
- Kudos 13y agoI doubt the incoming links are also identical.
- hackinthebochs 13y agoThat's amazing. Do you have an idea what the difference is? Something like a hot keyword in the domain, or even a closely related word?
- rossjudson 13y agoSounds like the algorithm noticed the duplication, and picked a "winner". The new winner isn't the same as the old one.
- boomzilla 13y agoWhile 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
- pmtarantino 13y agoFunny 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.
- munificent 13y agoShould have patented it!
- cfaftw 13y agoDid they send a reply?
- pmtarantino 13y agoNope, never.
- ucha 13y agoAs 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.
- rossjudson 13y agoThe 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.
- agumonkey 13y ago<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)
- joeblau 13y agoThe 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 13y agoIf 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 13y agoIn 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.
- taopao 13y agoConsult the SEO chicken bones.
- danso 13y agoThat'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
- hrktb 13y agoSo 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.
- tokenadult 13y agoI 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+search+algorithm https://www.google.com/search?q=How+has+Google+changed+its+s...
- pearjuice 13y agoI 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.
- mkr-hn 13y agoPeople 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.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI'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 :-)
- lucb1e 13y agoNot 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...
- known 13y agoI 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
- justin123 13y agoI 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.
- sanjita 13y ago:(