Latest update on Google search algorithm: hummingbird

At a special event in the garage where Google was born, the company announced that a handful of new updates to the search offering  including a major update to Google's search algorithm that the company calls "Hummingbird." The new algorithm will affects 90% of all searches, and has been in place for about a month, said Amit Singhal, senior VP at Google.

This new update from Google will give better results to the increasingly complex questions posed by people who uses Google search. The changes could have a major impact on traffic to websites. Hummingbird represents the most dramatic alteration to Google's search engine since it revised the way it indexes websites three years ago as part of a redesign called "Caffeine".

Google's renovations to its search engine haven't triggered widespread complaints from other websites yet, suggesting that the revisions haven't resulted in a radical reshuffling in how websites rank in the recommendations. The Caffeine update spurred a loud outcry because it explicitly sought to weed out websites that tried to trick Google's search engine into believing their content was related to common search requests. After Caffeine kicked in, hundreds of websites that consistently won a coveted spot near the top of Google's search results had been relegated to the back pages or exiled completely.