Google Announces Hummingbird Algorithm, Updates To Search, iOS App and Android 46
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."
Re:Tomorrow, not today (Score:3, Interesting)
Happy Birthday and exactly, I am also related to someone whose birthday is tomorrow, which is how I also remember it. Its amazing how with so much information at people's fingertips that they keep eroding facts.
Tomorrow is also the 30th anniversary of Richard Stallman announcing the FSF/GNU initiative.
Re:So what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
genius knackered (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been so long since Google moved the bar on search in a substantive way, I've begun to wonder if they still hold true to their original vision. It was something about indexing and knowledge.
Does it take a miraculous growth spurt of Wolfram Alpha to remind Google that innovation is still possible, fifteen years later? No matter if you burst onto the world stage shaming Picasso, any corporation that sits on its hands long enough eventually becomes part of the problem.
For a while Google was so good one almost believed their principal technology was a time machine. Lately I'm beginning to wonder if the time machine has its dial permanently welded at 2010.