Google has celebrated its 15th birthday with a major upgrade to its search engine facility.
The tech giant announced the Hummingbird overhaul yesterday from the company’s very first office – a garage used by founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page in Silicon Valley.
The presentation made by Google execs did not go into much detail, but outlined the Hummingbird technology as being suitable for longer and more complex queries, and more fitting for conversational interactions as users are expected to make far more voice-activated enquiries with the rise of wearable tech.
The new algorithm – which replaces predecessor Caffeine – differs from the latter by understanding concepts and the relationships between them, rather than simply words.
Where Caffeine worked by better indexing websites using keywords, Hummingbird is geared towards answering users’ questions before they are asked with a more intuitive, human understanding.
In that sense it’s an updated version of the firm’s Knowledge Graph, a database which helps Google web services understand real-world objects and concepts and the relationships between them.
Among the advances which will feature in search results are nutrition information when searching ‘butter vs olive oil’, and planet size when typing in ‘earth vs neptune’.
One exec gave a snazzy demonstration where she used voice search on her mobile phone to get pictures of the Eiffel Tower. Asking how tall it was, the search engine spoke the correct answer, before she requested pictures of the construction – the search engine duly obliged.
The new development reminds us just how much Google has defined the way we work and interact today. Can anyone remember going a week – even a day – without using the search engine for something?
Certainly it’s made life easier for journalists, making the once-laborious process of fact-checking a task taking seconds, and the Hummingbird algorithm shows the company is once again ahead of the curve, with the basic technology for voice searches being in place.
Other amazing developments include its capacious gmail service, its balloon internet provision, Google Play store and Street View – which lets you visit the world via your computer screen.
A simple pleasure of the day is going on their search page and seeing the various anniversary animations for notable authors, inventors and the like. Today Google’s put up a pinata game up to celebrate its own anniversary – try and beat my high score of 121.
Happy birthday Google, and thanks for all the presents.
