But these updates, so effective in what we define as middle- and head-tail queries, were not so effe

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Sometimes I think that us SEOs could be wonderful characters for a Woody Allen movie: We are stressed, nervous, paranoid, we have a tendency for sudden changes of mood...okay, 86 maybe I am exaggerating 86 a little bit, but that's how we tend to (over)react whenever Google announces something. Cases like this webmaster , who is desperately thinking he was penalized by Hummingbird, are not uncommon.
One thing that doesn't help is the lack of clarity coming from Google, which not only never mentions Hummingbird in any official document (for example, in the post of its 15th anniversary ), but has also shied away from details of this epochal update in the "off-the-record" declarations of Amit Singhal. In fact, in some ways those statements partly contributed to the confusion. When Google 86 announces an update especially one like Hummingbird the best thing to do is to avoid trying to immediately understand what it really is based on intuition alone. It is better to wait until the dust falls to the ground, recover the original documents, examine those related to them (and any variants), take the time to see the update in action, 86 calmly investigate, and then after all that try to find the most plausible answers. This method is not scientific (and therefore the answers can't be defined as "surely 86 correct"), it is philological, and when it comes to Google and its updates, I consider it a great method to use. The original documents are the story for the press of the event during which Google announced Hummingbird, and the FAQ that Danny Sullivan published immediately after the event, which makes direct reference to what Amit Singhal said. Related documents are the patents that probably underlie Hummingbird, and the observations that experts like Bill Slawski, Ammon Johns, Rand Fishkin, Aaron Bradley 86 and others have derived. This post is the result of my study of those documents and field observations. Why did Amit Singhal mix apples with oranges?
The (maybe unconscious) association Amit Singhal created between Caffeine and Hummingbird should tell us: That Hummingbird would not be here if Caffeine wasn't deployed in 2010, and hence it should be considered an evolution 86 of Google Search, and not a revolution . Moreover, that Hummingbird 86 should be considered Google's most ambitious attempt to solve all the algorithmic issues that Caffeine caused.
But these updates, so effective in what we define as middle- and head-tail queries, were not so effective for a type of query that mainly because of the fast adoption of mobile search by the users more and more people have begun to use: conversational long tail queries, or those that Amit Singhal has defined as "verbose queries."
The evolution of natural language recognition by Google, the improved ability to disambiguate entities and concepts through technology inherited from Metaweb and improved with Knowledge Graph, and the huge improvements made in the SERPs' personalized customization have given Google the theoretical and practical tools not only for solving the problem of long-tail 86 queries, but also for giving a fresh start to the evolution of Google Search.
That is the backstory that explains what Amit Singhal told about Hummingbird, paraphrased 86 here by Danny Sullivan: [Hummingbird] Gave us an opportunity [...] to take synonyms and knowledge graph and other things Google has been doing to understand meaning to rethink how we can use the power of all these things to combine meaning and predict how to match your query to the document in terms of what the query is really 86 wanting and are the connections available in the documents. and not just random coincidence that could be the case in early search engines. How does Hummingbird 86 work?
Google has been working with synonyms for a long time. If we look at the timeline Google itself shared in its 15th anniversary post, it has used them since 2002, even though we can also tell that disambiguation (meant as orthographic analysis of the queries) has been applied since 2001.
Reading that post and seeing the examples presented, it is clear that synonyms were already used by Google in connection with the user intent underlying the query in order to broaden the query and rewrite it to offer the best results to the users.
That same post, though, shows us why only using a thesaurus 86 of synonyms or relying on the knowledge of the highly ranked queries was not enough to assure relevant SERPs (see how Vanessa points out how Google doesn't consider "dogs" pets in the query "pet adoption," but does consider "cats").
Amit Singhal, in this old patent , was also conscious that only relying on synonyms was not a perfect solution, because two words may