Google Announces Hummingbird Algorithm, Updates To Search, iOS App and Android

rjmarvin writes "Google search is turning 15, and on a media field trip to the Menlo Park garage where Sergey Brin and Larry Page began the company, they rolled out a slew of product updates. Chief among them was the announcement of a new search algorithm called Hummingbird along with an updated Knowledge Graph and other search improvements, on top of updated Google Now cards for Android, push notifications for Google's iOS app and more."

Comments

Tomorrow, not today

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who's birthday is also September 27th, I can tell you that Google's birthday is tomorrow too, not today. Every year I'm greeted with a birthday graphic on the Google homepage. For the first two years, I just thought Google had somehow figured out when my birthday was and was customizing the page for me personally. But when I mentioned it to co-workers, it turned out they were only doing it for me :-)

So what?

[Joining Yet Again]

Google's not improved for a decade.

The only reason it's still up there is that Yahoo's not improved for nearly two decades, and Microsoft can't do anything right.

Re:So what?

[Cinder6]

Not the parent, but I feel like the quality of Google search has gone down in a few ways. For instance, I found the old '+' operator much quicker and less cumbersome than enclosing the word in quotes.

Further, I often abhor Google's "fuzzy" matching system. Sometimes it's great, like when you say "photo" and it also searches "picture", "photograph", etc. But other times, it's extremely frustrating. I was writing a Mac app a few months back, and I needed help on something specific with NSTableView. Google decided that UITableView was the same thing, and started showing results for that at the top. Incredibly annoying, and it kept showing up even if I used quotes (had to use "-uitableview" to get it to go away). Not sure if that was a bug or if Google just really thinks I should be programming for iOS.

I think I run into the latter situation more often than the former. At least, that's what it feels like.

Re:So what?

[swillden]

Further, I often abhor Google's "fuzzy" matching system. Sometimes it's great, like when you say "photo" and it also searches "picture", "photograph", etc. But other times, it's extremely frustrating.

When the fuzzy matching doesn't give you what you're looking for click on "Search tools" (just above the results), then the "All results" pulldown and "Verbatim".

I tried to use your example to demonstrate, but even without verbatim mode I couldn't find a search result in the first half-dozen pages that mentioned "UITableView".

However, I did notice one thing that was kind of funny: Next to the results pulldown there's a time pulldown. When I set it to "last hour" the top hit was your post above.