As you're probably aware, Google spends a lot of time tweaking results to attempt to make them better and more relevant. It does this several hundred times a year, but mostly it's on really subtle things, so virtually no-one notices it. Every now and then however, Google does a really big update, which changes a lot of results, and can cause real headaches for people, since the results you got yesterday are not the same as the results that you get today. Particularly a problem if you rely on Google to put your company name front and centre for specific searches!
Google gives this major updates names - a bit like we do with hurricanes. The last one was Panda, and the one before that was Caffeine in June 2010. So the short answer to the question 'What is Google Hummingbird?' is that it's a major change in the way in which Google interprets and returns search results. However, in more depth - Hummingbird is working with the Google Knowledge Graph results to try and provide you with more detail on concepts, rather than simple searches. So a search for Henry VIII will not only return you webpages, but it'll also provide you with basic factual information, details on his wives and so on.
Hummingbird works particularly well with mobile search - if you do a search for 'tell me about impressionist artists' for example, Google will provide some examples of them, as well as detailing webpages. If you ask Google for 'Pictures of Big Ben' it will find them, and if you then go on to ask 'how tall is it?' Google will assume that you're referring to Big Ben, rather than running a search for the phrase "how tall is it?" (Be aware though, if you try this using the web based version on a desk/laptop, that IS what Google will do.) However, depending on the search that you ask, Google is getting more intelligent. If you do a search asking to compare butter and olive oil Google will pull up some facts and figures for you - in a similar way that Wolfram|Alpha works.
What other changes can we expect? I was talking to Karen Blakeman, and we both agreed that we simply don't know yet. It's really far to early to tell what's going to happen in the longer term. Just be aware that if you run the same search regularly - if there's a sudden shift in the results that you get, it could well be Hummingbird working in the background.
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