Google claims that humans have begun to use ever more sophisticated, conversational queries, while making the move away from short directed terms. After all, folks these days tend to be more likely to write complex and perhaps some might even say long winded stories, and these are very difficult to parse for the search engine. Hence, the shift to a more conversational tone is required to be part of the search engine’s repertoire. According to a Google spokesperson, “Hummingbird pays more attention to each word in the query, ensuring the whole query is taken into account – so if a resulting page is a bit less strong in general, but it’s the most relevant to your search terms, that’s the result you’ll get. And if there are plenty of relevant matches to your search terms, Hummingbird does a better job picking the strongest page for you.”
I am awaiting the backlash from some websites that have been configured SEO-wise to make the most out of Panda. Will we see sudden drops in PageRank for some?