day 1235: New Search Algorithm

"Search for the Lord and for his strength; continually seek him."

A little known fact to most of us, well very well known to those who manage and watch search engine optimization (SEO) is that Google just changed their search engine algorithm, again.  They don’t change it every day but this latest change follows a recent overhaul in 2010. Google calls their new updates interesting things like, “Caffeine Update” and “Hummingbird” (the latest version).  Along the way they released partial updates like “Panda” and “Penguin”.  If you are wondering, what does this mean to you, well, maybe nothing, but it’s a good chance that your search results are going to change.  What is new is further advancement of “Conversational Search”, which should give us all a more natural way of typing in our queries and getting back what we wanted. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngine Land describes an example this way:

“"What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example. Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words. In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.” So, we could be at the dawn of a new era of search, or maybe not.  But, if we have a website, we should be watching to see if our SEO is improving or not and then adapt as needed.  
 
I love that God gives us always available search access to Him and He always answers.  Of course, like some search results, we may not understand how that answer is what we were looking for, but what we can hold onto and always trust is that His answers will always come back to us and whatever they are they will always be the right answer for us at the time.  Our search engine?  Prayer!  What have we been holding back that needs a little searching done today?  He’s waiting on us with His divine algorithm!

Reference:  Psalm 105:4 (New Living Translation)