Algorithms For Dummies

 Exploring the World of Graphs

the Google engine as a ranking factor, albeit not sufficiently to enlist a page into 

the best results after a query.

Introducing semantic queries

If you currently try to pose questions, not just chains of keywords, to Google, 

you’ll notice that it tends to answer smartly and gets the sense of question. Since 

2012, Google became better able to understand synonyms and concepts. However, 

after  August  2013,  with  the  Hummingbird  update  (

http://searchengineland. 

com/google-hummingbird-172816

), the search engine became capable of under-

standing conversational searches (queries in which you ask something as you 

would say it to another person) as well as the semantics behind queries and a 

page’s contents.

Since this update, the Google algorithm works by disambiguating both users’ 

intentions and the meanings expressed by pages, not just by the keywords. Now, 

the search engine works more in a semantic way, which means understanding 

what words imply on both sides: the query and resulting web pages. In this sense, 

it can’t be tricked anymore by playing with keywords. Even without much support 

from PageRank, it can look at how a page is written and get a sense of whether the 

page contains good enough content for inclusion in the results of a query.