Google has modified the classified formula which runs its internet search engine, a move which could lead to a major reshuffle in how internet traffic is handled.
The overhaul is aimed at improving the search qualities, as the
questions posed by the users are becoming increasingly complex.
The update will help the engine to understand complicated
concepts instead of words.
‘Hummingbird’ was presented on Thursday, in the Menlo Park,
California, at the garage where the company’s CEO Larry Page and
fellow co-founder Sergey Brin started the company 15 years ago.
The changes are set to affect 90 percent of searches: Google is
the major player in the field, accounting for two out of three
search requests in the US and sometimes even bigger percentage in
Europe.
Prices for advertisements in Google which are tied to search
requests could also grow. The company’s revenue is set to
approach $60 billion this year, AP reported.
Apart from ‘Hummingbird’, several other updates have been
announced, with most aiming at providing the data more concisely
to allow people not to navigate to another website to find out
more – which can prove difficult on small smart phone screens.
These changes mainly affect the ‘Knowledge Graph’, a box that
appears on top or alongside other search results. In particular,
its new version will be able to compare the attributes of two
different things. ‘Google Now’, a virtual assistant that provides
for the user the information about his interests and location,
will start flagging new developments – for example, in the life
of a celebrity - that interest the user.
This major reshuffle comes three years after another modification
called ‘Caffeine’, the company’s senior vice president Amit
Singhal pointed out.
"Remember what it was like to search in 1998? You'd sit down
and boot up your bulky computer, dial up on your squawky modem,
type in some keywords, and get 10 blue links to websites that had
those words," Singhal wrote in a separate blog post.
"The world has changed so much since then: billions of people
have come online, the web has grown exponentially, and now you
can ask any question on the powerful little device in your
pocket."
Google’s reshuffles have also come under fire from other websites
which say the overhauls cause internet traffic across the globe
to skew dramatically. As a result, many pages’ rank has fallen or
risen in recommendations.
For instance, the Caffeine update caused a widespread outcry, as
it attempted to weed out the websites which tried to trick the
search engine into believing that their content was related to
common search requests.