Way back on the 17th of May, 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph for those search on Google.com in US English, with the mission of helping “you discover new information quickly and easily”.
Now, Google has launched the Knowledge Graph for Australians searching in Australian English, as announced over at Google’s Official Australian Blog.
What Google is trying to do is understand “things” – not just words, with the example of the “taj mahal” given.
This could be the Taj Mahal in India, it could be the singer, a restaurant, a casino – it could be all of those things, with Google seeking to have its “Knowledge Graph” be something “that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings [of text]”.
Google suggests you do a search for the “Sydney Opera House” or “AC/DC” or “cloudstreet” to see the new information that is presented to the left alongside the regular search results (and ads!) that Google displays, which will quickly make it clear the type of additional information that Google is serving up in an attempt to anticipate what it is you’re really looking for.
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So, by cross referencing what other users have searched for, how they searched for them and what interested them, Google’s Knowledge Graph seeks to give you much more than a bunch of links to other sites – it seeks to give you more information “that’s relevant to your query” then and there – but without rendering the sites with more information useless, or so Google claims.
Google says it uses public sources of information such as “Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook” – but they’re not the only sources, with the graph containing “more than 50 million objects as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects”, thus “augmenting” the graph “at a much larger scale”.
Indeed, what Google wants to do is help you do more than just “find the right thing” when you do a search – Google also wants to then help you to “get the best summary” and after that, to “go deeper and broader” should you so choose.
In short, Google wants to be more relevant and more useful to you – right when you’re searching for information, and rather than have you go off on a tangent somewhere through a bunch of links that may or may not have the info you want, or want quickly and easily; to give you the info you need to find that next piece of info, related to the first, that truly answers what it is you were looking to discover.
Google says it hopes “this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics”, and proud that this “first baby step” with the “Knowledge Graph” is helping to “make search more intelligent”, with this step “moving us closer to the ‘Star Trek computer’” that we all know so well from science fiction, so, Google, says, “you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love”.
