(Research) Google's New Update with Patents: Hummingbird
Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2024 9:13 am
Hello everyone after a long event period! I am excited to return to our blog which we have not been able to pay much attention to during the preparations for Turkey's first international SEO event SEOZONE'13. Today, while Google is celebrating its 15th birthday, the day before its birthday ( September 26, 2013 ), Google's senior vice president Amit Singhal announced the Hummingbird update!
This news, which had such a shocking effect that it cast a shadow over Google's 15th anniversary celebrations, spread quickly across the internet media . The main reason why this update attracted so much attention was that, as Amit stated, 90% of the queries were affected. As seen in Google's Analytics results in the past days, after all of the search traffic was marked as (not provided), what Google, which published many striking news one after another, wanted to do with this update naturally became the center of attention.
In order to intervene in the disinformation that has been spreading after all the known Google updates and to provide accurate information, we have researched all the authority sources in the sector and compiled the results for you. I hope I was able to write a useful research article!
Is the 90% statistic given by Google really true?
First of all, I should point out that there is not much information homeowner database available on this subject at the moment. As is the case after every Google update, we have to make statements based on the limited information available in the market and share our conclusions by continuing our analysis.
What sets this update apart from others is that these developments that we are used to hearing from Matt Cutts are coming from another mouth, and in fact this update has been live for about a month?! According to Amit's statement, this update was included in the search index in the last months of the summer and is still active to this day , but this is the first time the announcement about this update has been published. I think it is quite striking for the SEO world that the change is at 90%, but as SEO enthusiasts, we can sometimes have some doubts about the Google search team always sharing "very accurate" information with us. So, let's examine the movements in MozCast in the last 30 days to examine the situation from an unbiased source.
A quick side note for those who don’t know, MozCast is a free tool produced by our partner Moz, as its name suggests. It constantly tracks the general changes in certain search queries and tells you this change in a humorous way in the form of a daily weather forecast . Regular MozCast followers can easily understand that the search results were not very variable in the last 30 days we saw above and that there is no statistic that would affect 90% of the searches.
When evaluating the results of these conflicting statistics, we need to ignore the fact that these searches are made by evaluating only certain search results. Personally, I think that in these statistics produced within the Delta10 metrics that Dr. Pete launched during the EMD updates, most of the keywords are followed for short words called short-tails. Considering that the 90% statistic is given by Google, it is possible to infer that all existing search index and queries are evaluated . Now, to evaluate the issue from Google's perspective, let's examine this statistic that rates the search rates on the internet according to the number of words:
These statistics show that, in fact, approximately 70% of searches made today consist entirely of long-tail words . While the short search queries with the highest competition rate, referred to as Fat-Head (1-2 words) (e.g. shoes ) , have the highest competition and very high search volumes, the medium-length words referred to as Chunky-Middle (2-4 words) (e.g. cheap shoes ) and the long searches known as long-tail (4+ words) (e.g. cheap red shoes ) make up the majority of the market. So the 90% change that Google is referring to here is most likely to include long queries in general.
Relationship Between Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird Update
When we read the press release made to verify this inference, it is emphasized that there are very important changes in order to " make search results more understandable on Google's side with the system created ". If we consider that it is quite difficult to understand the user's search behavior and the real purpose of the search in a short query, we can confirm that this update is actually valid for long-tail phrases where people express their demands more clearly . When we go into a little more detail, we need to examine the Knowledge Graph results, which we can describe as the precursor of Hummingbird, in order to fully understand the details .
As can be seen in the example, thanks to the Knowledge Graph, we can see some details we may need about Steve Jobs in the new box on the right side for any query . As it turns out, Google must have received valid marks from users with this new model that it has been implementing for a while, because it continues its investments in this area with algorithmic arrangements such as Hummingbird. The main thing to emphasize here is that Google's Hummingbird update wants to bring the relationship of queries that have already been live for a while with the Knowledge Graph to the entire web index. In more clear terms: "Google, which analyzes queries with a different technology to convey user requests to the Knowledge Graph, will now work to make this technology valid not only for the Knowledge Graph but for the entire Web". I am aware that this situation seems a bit complex, but in order to summarize it more clearly in your mind, we prepared a video in the office with our SEO director Mehmet Aktuğ
This news, which had such a shocking effect that it cast a shadow over Google's 15th anniversary celebrations, spread quickly across the internet media . The main reason why this update attracted so much attention was that, as Amit stated, 90% of the queries were affected. As seen in Google's Analytics results in the past days, after all of the search traffic was marked as (not provided), what Google, which published many striking news one after another, wanted to do with this update naturally became the center of attention.
In order to intervene in the disinformation that has been spreading after all the known Google updates and to provide accurate information, we have researched all the authority sources in the sector and compiled the results for you. I hope I was able to write a useful research article!
Is the 90% statistic given by Google really true?
First of all, I should point out that there is not much information homeowner database available on this subject at the moment. As is the case after every Google update, we have to make statements based on the limited information available in the market and share our conclusions by continuing our analysis.
What sets this update apart from others is that these developments that we are used to hearing from Matt Cutts are coming from another mouth, and in fact this update has been live for about a month?! According to Amit's statement, this update was included in the search index in the last months of the summer and is still active to this day , but this is the first time the announcement about this update has been published. I think it is quite striking for the SEO world that the change is at 90%, but as SEO enthusiasts, we can sometimes have some doubts about the Google search team always sharing "very accurate" information with us. So, let's examine the movements in MozCast in the last 30 days to examine the situation from an unbiased source.
A quick side note for those who don’t know, MozCast is a free tool produced by our partner Moz, as its name suggests. It constantly tracks the general changes in certain search queries and tells you this change in a humorous way in the form of a daily weather forecast . Regular MozCast followers can easily understand that the search results were not very variable in the last 30 days we saw above and that there is no statistic that would affect 90% of the searches.
When evaluating the results of these conflicting statistics, we need to ignore the fact that these searches are made by evaluating only certain search results. Personally, I think that in these statistics produced within the Delta10 metrics that Dr. Pete launched during the EMD updates, most of the keywords are followed for short words called short-tails. Considering that the 90% statistic is given by Google, it is possible to infer that all existing search index and queries are evaluated . Now, to evaluate the issue from Google's perspective, let's examine this statistic that rates the search rates on the internet according to the number of words:
These statistics show that, in fact, approximately 70% of searches made today consist entirely of long-tail words . While the short search queries with the highest competition rate, referred to as Fat-Head (1-2 words) (e.g. shoes ) , have the highest competition and very high search volumes, the medium-length words referred to as Chunky-Middle (2-4 words) (e.g. cheap shoes ) and the long searches known as long-tail (4+ words) (e.g. cheap red shoes ) make up the majority of the market. So the 90% change that Google is referring to here is most likely to include long queries in general.
Relationship Between Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird Update
When we read the press release made to verify this inference, it is emphasized that there are very important changes in order to " make search results more understandable on Google's side with the system created ". If we consider that it is quite difficult to understand the user's search behavior and the real purpose of the search in a short query, we can confirm that this update is actually valid for long-tail phrases where people express their demands more clearly . When we go into a little more detail, we need to examine the Knowledge Graph results, which we can describe as the precursor of Hummingbird, in order to fully understand the details .
As can be seen in the example, thanks to the Knowledge Graph, we can see some details we may need about Steve Jobs in the new box on the right side for any query . As it turns out, Google must have received valid marks from users with this new model that it has been implementing for a while, because it continues its investments in this area with algorithmic arrangements such as Hummingbird. The main thing to emphasize here is that Google's Hummingbird update wants to bring the relationship of queries that have already been live for a while with the Knowledge Graph to the entire web index. In more clear terms: "Google, which analyzes queries with a different technology to convey user requests to the Knowledge Graph, will now work to make this technology valid not only for the Knowledge Graph but for the entire Web". I am aware that this situation seems a bit complex, but in order to summarize it more clearly in your mind, we prepared a video in the office with our SEO director Mehmet Aktuğ