BPN 1662: Google introduces new search algorithm

Under the name Hummingbird, Google has introduced a new version of het search algorithm. The introduction comes on the 15^th anniversary of Google.

The company started out with the search algorithm BackRub, which was based on search software available at Stanford University. The software worked with Boolean principles of AND, OR and NOT, including or excluding keywords. Besides the first searchers usually formed search arguments with a single keyword or more keywords. But as searchers become more sophisticated and are working with concepts and meanings, the search algorithm has become insufficient. In the meantime more than 90 per cent of the search questions are processed through the Hummingbird search algorithm.

This year it is 15 years ago that Larry Page en Sergey Brin incorporated their company and started to work in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who is now a senior Google executive. On September 27^th, 1998 their index system had surpassed Yahoo’s search engine in indexed terms. Interesting is the fact that Google started to collaborate with Yahoo! In 2000 and became their standard search provider. In the same year Google announced the first index with a billion URLs, thus becoming the largest search engine in the world.

The founders of Google knew each other from 1996 onwards. As postdoc students of Stanford University they had started to work together on a search engine, which they called BackRub. The system, on which they based BackRub, was already in use on the servers of Stanford for more than a year, but was abandoned as it used too much band with. By 1997 Page and Brin decided that BackRub needed a new name. After a brainstorm, they selected the name Google, a pundit on the mathematical term googol, which stands for 1 followed by 100 zero’s. The new name also reflected their mission aiming at organising a sheer unending quantity of information on internet.