Google: A Birthday Blogpost

Yesterday was the fifteenth anniversary of the incorporation of what would become one of the most prominent businesses in the world; a search engine that would revolutionise the Internet and even would be entered as a verb into the Oxford English Dictionary. So pervasive is Google, that they aim for the lofty height of organising the world's information, and making it universally accessible and simultaneously desiring to do no evil.

But this post is not about Google's 15th birthday, it is instead about our birthday present from Google, affecting 90% of all searches! Senior VP Amit Singhal unveiled a new algorithm called Hummingbird. This product joins the lines of algorithm services such as Penguin and Panda. But unlike integrating search with social as the Penguin 2.0 update attempted earlier in the year, Hummingbird is attempting to increase the very intelligence of the search engine via matching meanings of words and not just the words themselves, meaning it should be able to answer actual questions when asked by a user. This heightened sense of relationship between words is also applied to raw information in terms of concepts and the connections between them in order to boost the yield of useful information for users and as a result, create an all-round better service for you. Before this update the technology had only been applied to Knowledge Graph, but now is seeing its debut engine-wide.

To celebrate Google's anniversary here is a timeline of search updates, courtesy to PC World.

Google's Development: 1998-2013; So much achieved in so little time. 

LINKS:

1. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/26/google-changes-search-to-handle-more-complex-queries/?_r=0 (New York Times, 27/9/2013)
2. http://searchengineland.com/google-hummingbird-172816 (SearchEngineLand, 27/9/2013)