The Google Knowledge Graph
Interesting post on the official Google blog yesterday by Amit Singhal about their new Knowledge Graph (currently being rolled out only in the U.S.). This is essentially a step towards making the Google search engine more intelligent – more able to discern what a user might be searching for when the individual words may be ambiguous or may be a seed term for a much wider collection of information. For example, if a searcher enters the name of a famous person they are likely to want certain basic facts about that person, where they were born, the work they have done etc. It is easy for a human being to understand words in context and the relationships and connections between different groups of words but, even with all the technology available today, this is still much harder for a computer to do.
The aim of the Knowledge Graph, not surprisingly, is to provide more relevant search results: removing ambiguity in the searches we make, better understanding our queries and showing us connections or related facts that we might not know about but are looking to discover.
The Knowledge Graph collects information about words, for example, people, buildings, animals all have particular attributes that are relevant. We might expect to be able to easily find the Date of Birth for a person, whether they are married or have children and perhaps their education; the location and date built for a famous building, or the natural habitat, weight and speed of a certain animal.
A new panel will be displayed next to the search results showing those basic facts related to your search term and also connections to relevant objects such as books, films etc.
Google has used information that other searchers have found useful in the past to help build up the database behind the Knowledge Graph. It will serve up key facts that we might need for a fuller understanding of the main topic of our search.
I am looking forward to the Knowledge Graph being rolled out in the UK so I can take a look myself – if you’ve seen it yet why not leave a comment on your experience with it?