Hummingbird is the name given to one of Google’s algorithms. It was first released by Google back in August 2013 and continues to this day. Hummingbird was developed in order for Google to better match user intent with its search engine results pages (SERPs). This means that the SERPs are more accurate for the user and show better results.
In practice, Hummingbird uses machine learning to assess the contextual intent of a search term. The application of Hummingbird to Google searches has reduced the number of irrelevant or out-of-context results, helping match more searches with what the web user is looking for.