Google unveils major overhaul of its search engine

Google's changes are a big deal because so many other companies rely on Google search results to get visitors to their own websites.

MENLO PARK, Calif. - Google unveiled a big revamp of its search engine last month that reportedly affects 90% of the search results served up worldwide by the Internet giant.

'It is really big,' said Google search executive Amit Singhal. Google unveiled the change at the old Menlo Park, Calif., house of Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of Google advertising, in whose garage Google started in 1998. The company opened the space for reporters to announce its latest search efforts. Called Hummingbird internally, the change to Google's main search algorithm actually kicked in about a month ago, but was not disclosed by Google until 27th of September at an event in Silicon Valley, marking the company's 15-year anniversary.

“The new algorithm makes search results more relevant and useful, especially when users ask more complex questions — something that has been happening a lot more in recent years,” Singhal explained.

Google dominates the multibillion-dollar Web search business, so any changes it makes to search are closely watched, especially by those in the Internet and advertising industries. Google uses its search algorithm to retrieve and sort the best results for a given search query, out of its index of billions of web pages. Google claims that the Hummingbird algorithm would return better, improved search results.

The search giant also claims that its new algorithm overhaul supports “conversational search”, wherein the search engine would better understand the meaning behind each word in search queries, rather than finding web pages that just happen to have the same words. Though Google has been returning “semantic” results within its “Knowledge Graph” searches for quite a while, the company’s current move extends semantic search to all web searches.

This essentially supports the company’s strategic direction towards mobile-based searches. Industry experts see this move as a step forward in rivaling Apple’s Siri voice search.

'Industries hold their breath whenever something like this happens because it changes the way search results appear,' said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at B. Riley & Co. 'Google is such a significant part of traffic to most websites, so any change in algorithms is extremely important.'

“Companies including Demand Media, TripAdvisor, Bankrate.com, Yelp and WebMD get a lot of their Web traffic from Google search results and some of these companies have been hit by changes in the company's algorithms in the past,” Sinha noted.

Even though the company announced the change a month after it was actually rolled out, so far there has been no significant reports of decline in traffic yet. “No one seems to have generally lost traffic, unlike some other algorithmic changes, which often produce vocal ‘losers’ and silent ‘winners,’” Danny Sullivan, Founding Editor of Search Engine Land, has reportedly told in an email to Venturebeat this week.

In a parallel development, Google also started encrypting all web searches conducted in its search engine, which has reportedly shot up the percentage of “Not Provided” keywords in Google Analytics’ organic keyword referrals up to 100%. This means that the webmasters may no longer be able to see which keywords their visitors have used to arrive at their websites.

However, Jenny Halasz, an SEO consultant, noted in her comment, “It’s becoming less and less about the keyword and more about the intention behind it. We see that with all the recent changes, but especially with Hummingbird.”

Google revolutionized search by developing the PageRank system for ranking the world's Web pages based on relevance, using an algorithm that tracked how many times those pages are referenced by other pages. In 2010, Google completely changed the system through an upgrade called Caffeine — and now the company has rebuilt it again with Hummingbird. While the change was expected to affect 90% of the overall search queries, we are yet to see any significant reports of decline in website traffic from webmasters.

Meanwhile, Ben Gomes, a top Google engineer originally from India, said that Google's voice-recognition technology used to have trouble handling his mix of Indian and American accents. But now, he said, the technology picks up his speech accurately.

'Today, voice search is actually working,' Singhal added.