Google's Second Brain: How the Knowledge Graph Changes Search 76
waderoush writes "Last spring Google introduced its English-speaking users to the Knowledge Graph, a vast semantic graph of real-world entities and properties born from the Freebase project at Metaweb Technologies (which Google acquired in 2010). This month Google began showing Knowledge Graph results to speakers of seven other languages. Though the project has received little coverage, the consequences could be as far-reaching as previous overhauls to Google's infrastructure, such as the introduction of universal search back in 2007. That's because the Knowledge Graph plugs a big hole in Google's technology: the lack of a common-sense understanding of the things in its Web index. Despite all the statistical magic that made Google's keyword-based retrieval techniques so effective, 'We didn't ever represent the real world properly in the computer,' says Google senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal. He says the Knowledge Graph represents a 'baby step' toward future computer systems that can intuit what humans are searching for and respond with exact answers, rather than the classic ten blue links. 'Now, when you encounter encounters the letters T-A-J-M-A-H-A-L on any Web page, the computers suddenly start understanding that this document is about the monument, and this one is about the musician, and this one is about a restaurant,' Singhal says. 'That 'aboutness' is foundational to building the search of tomorrow.'"
Re:Headed for the "Google Graveyard"? (Score:5, Informative)
The obvious difference would be that Google never presents its graph to the user explicitly, it only uses it internally to (hopefully) come up with more-relevant search results.
So you won't have your GUI cluttered up by the Knowledge Graph.
Re:They do that already. (Score:4, Informative)
That's a cool story, but it really has nothing to do with the article. It's basically a fortuitous coincidence that other people don't know what fennel looks like, and have blogged about it associated with the phrase "what vegetable is this?"
This looks like it's primarily interested with homonyms - words with different meanings, but the same arrangement of letters. Like, say, "Prince". Prince could refer either to the title, a particular holder of that title, a brandname, or a bunch of other things. Think wikipedia's disambiguation page. This technology is basically giving google the ability to determine which particular meaning a given instance of the word is talking about, given context.
For instance, if a page contained the phrase "Taj Mahal menu", Google would know internally that that page referred to the Taj Mahal restaurant because it has a sufficient knowledge of semantics and context to understand that monuments and musicians don't have menus, but restaurants do, and that the phrase "Taj Mahal" could refer to any of those things.