One answer - one thousand questions

Hello to all!

Do you remember your first attempts at writing any sort of content? A letter home from boarding school or college, an essay on some boring topic that was part of the anything-but-wonderful class you had foolishly enrolled in because... well, because. Pick any ending to this story. I picked chemistry, because I thought it would be fun to experiment with substances that were never meant to be put together, short of in a bunker for nuclear disasters. That really wasn't the problem however. The fact I had to document every step of the way to this resulting disaster was. I switched to music after I managed to burn a hole in a steel table, on advice from the headmistress.

But, seriously, was your first attempt at whatever-writing-it-was good? Letters to parents excepted. They always think any letter from their child is wonderful. Even more so in these days of emails and mobile phones. ASIDE: Please, all kids away from home, send your parents a snail-mail letter every now and then. It will be considered better than any Christmas present to them.

But back to writing content. Today, we all know we need good, honest, clean content for our websites. Without it, any website is going to be chewed up and spat back out sooner or later. Google is working towards understanding just what a person wants when they type in a query to a search engine. And there can be a thousand ways to ask one question. This is where Hummingbird comes in. Every person in the world has a different way to ask one question, although they may appear the same. Words bolded, words singular or plural, misspelt or correct, long and boring or short and not easily understandable. Take a look at the way your two-year old asks for a glass of milk and how your father-in-law does.

This will get you some idea of what Hummingbird tries to do. No alogarithm can match human speech yet exactly, but it is trying bloody hard. So don't try to be smart  or cute with your keywords. Keep them simple and they will be more effective. And by all means, try to use keywords that can also be long-tailed. As the example of the baby and the older man asking for a drink of milk shows, there can be a lot of ways to ask the same question.

So, don't spend days or weeks tearing your hair out trying to find what Google means with their latest 'pet'. Simplified, they are trying to build an alogorithm that can decipher 'human speak'.

And they will get there, or very close to it. Eventually.