Hummingbird was a significant change to Google’s search algorithm, released in August 2013.
Googlers described the Hummingbird update as the biggest change to Google’s algorithm since 2001. Matt Cutts, the former head of the web spam team at Google, said it had been a total rewrite of the core algorithm.
The Hummingbird update allowed Google to better understand longer natural language queries by extracting the most important words from them and show more relevant search results.
This update was significant for mobile voice search, where search queries could be longer and more conversational.
Although, according to Matt Cutts, this update affected around 90% of searches, its impact on the search results was not drastic. However, Hummingbird paved the way for many other updates and improvements.
No. Hummingbird was a rewrite of Google’s core algorithm, not a standalone algorithm like PageRank or RankBrain.