Google’s Hummingbird: An Advantage to Digital Marketing
According to this news piece from Forbes, Google has come up with a new search algorithm named the Hummingbird search algorithm. This algorithm is specifically meant to control the results for the user’s search queries in search engine. According, to Hof (2013) the contributor of Forbes who wrote this story, this new algorithm by Google is one of the big change that has been introduced by one of the largest search engines in the world. Google Corporation introduced this update as the author writes on August 2013. The announcement and launch was conducted at Menlo Park, where Google started its operations.
Google’s humming bird offers a platform to process voice queries. It endeavors to detect or understand what the user intents instead of focusing on the keywords that are used in the search bar (Shapiro, 2013, 13). For example, rather than matching a phrase like “kindle replacement” hummingbird will focus overall search query in determining if the user wants to perform the repairs himself or if he she is looking for a shop that could do the repairs. This approach will be significant for users since they will be able to search and find what they are looking in a faster manner. This is more particular if the question being asked is simply entered into the search bar where answers are being sought instead of trying to find relevant keywords (Hasty, 2013, 7).
Google’s Hummingbird was specifically designed to deliver enhanced results especially for users with voice queries. The algorithm was also launched in an attempt to offering more accurate results through understanding the intent of the search and refining those results on specific contexts such as the location as well as the information regarding the researcher. This means that hummingbird tries to understand the entire query and not necessarily the keywords. In accordance to Beel et al, (2013, 177) this is a significant transition whereby, search engines are able to understand particular concepts instead of simply understanding keywords. Hummingbird aims to understand the intention of the particular query as well as offering relevant answers instead with no reliance on keywords.
The introduction of hummingbird algorithm has absolutely caught the attention of many digital marketers. Alongside requiring an enabling, rich and original content that may address the client’s particular needs and issues, it also enables a structuring of the brand’s website content in order to be successful in Google. The introduction of hummingbird algorithm will certainly shift the rankings of websites. Businesses that did not yield good results for terms that are generic will have more opportunity to be positioned better using this algorithm (Woelker, 2013, 1).
Further, hummingbird has been considered as one of the most effective instruments that can be used to create valuable and original content. Hummingbird can also be used to leverage the emphasis on search intention by use of direct feedback and metrics in understanding the audience. Further, hummingbird can be of great assistance with regard to generation of ideas for digital marketing (Virtue, 2013, 16).
Incorporation of hummingbird algorithm into digital marketing provides the immediate advantage of offering clients a basis of honest feedback to making the company’s services and products more better and enhanced. Another benefit derived from this algorithm is that the consumer’s issues or queries can be directly addressed in an open forum. For example, a client can pose that he is a dealer in children’s apparel when it is discovered that your company sources products from China with dies that are lead based. By making able to address such issues before hand and on the company’s website, the conversation can be coraled and subsequently kept in a central place, rather than failing to address it or blocking feedback or client’s queries altogether. Apparently, the hummingbird update offers businesses a variety of topics to discuss or write about as well as giving them an opportunity to update an older content that therefore make it fresh (Sharma, 2011, 99).
Google’s Hummingbird was specifically, designed to deliver enhanced results especially for users with voice queries. The algorithm was also launched in an attempt to offering more accurate results through understanding the intent of the search and refining those results on specific contexts such as the location as well as the information regarding the search. This means that hummingbird tries to understand the entire query and not necessarily the keywords. In accordance to Walters, (2013) this is a significant transition whereby, search engines are able to understand particular concepts instead of simply understanding keywords. Hummingbird aims to understand the intention of the particular query as well as offering relevant answers instead with no reliance on keywords (125).
In essence, Google’s humming bird offers a platform to process voice queries. It endeavors to detect or understand what the user intents instead of focusing on the keywords that are used in the search bar. For example, rather than matching a phrase like “kindle replacement” hummingbird will focus overall search query in determining if the user wants to perform the repairs himself or if he she is looking for a shop that could do the repairs. This approach will be significant for users since they will be able to search and find what they are looking in a faster manner. This is more particular if the question being asked is simply entered into the search bar where answers are being sought instead of trying to find relevant keywords.
In particular, Google’s humming bird focuses on finding content that is relevant, high quality and matches that align with the user searches. Putting it more simply, it filters content in a more effectively way. This is very important for people whose sites have already high content, as the algorithm will ultimately perform better with regard to ranking and appearance in the user’s searches.
However, for websites with contents, which are not of high quality, they will have to change them to reflect high quality or unique content. Low quality contents will not appear in some searchers and this will make the business loose the competitive edge over similar ones that have posted high quality contents. The reason behind this is that Google generally dislikes spams, duplicate or irrelevant things that are entered in keywords. Further, if a website appears to contain spammy or jammed contents, it will result into it being ranked lowly and therefore jeopardizing the company’s image. In this perspective, Google is after quality content.
Conclusion
Google’s hummingbird algorithm will be essentially beneficial to business enterprises as well as users who would anticipate for an enhanced search results. This also regards the case when trying to leverage the local events and news in order to updates their websites. In a similar way, business enterprises in similar markets will find the hummingbird beneficial owing to the fact that people are now using search terms that are more specific and which are much longer, it therefore translates that higher pertinent phrases would now be easily ranked by use of this updated algorithm.
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