Google launches Knowledge Graph
Google is trying to think like a person.
On Wednesday, Google announced Knowledge Graph, a change in how the search results are delivered that the company believes will be helpful to users. It’s meant to help you find your search results better.
Say you search for the term “kings.” You could be searching for a sports team, a television show, or royalty. Knowledge Graph will deliver results arranged according to categories with which the search term has been associated. You’ll also get a box to the right of the results explaining more about your search term.
“The web pages we [currently] return for the search ‘kings,’ they’re all good,” Jack Menzel, director of product management at Google, told CNN in an interview. “You, as a human, associate those words with their real-world meaning but, for a computer, they’re just a random string of characters.”
“It hones your search results right in on the task that you’re after,” she said.
Shashidhar Thakur, Google’s Tech Lead in Search, told ABC News that a team at Google has been working on the Knowledge Graph for two years. The initial version of Knowledge Graph has information on 500 million people, places and things and uses 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections to create categories for them. It has surpassed the launch of Google Image and Google News in terms of data available on the first day.
The feature will begin Wednesday afternoon for some users in the United States and will eventually be available on desktop, mobile and tablet searches. Initially, it will only be available in English but will eventually be in other languages as well.
