Google reinvents search—again—with Knowledge Graph (Video)

Élyse Betters | May 16 2012 - 11:34 am PT

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mmQl6VGvX-c]

Google just made searching the Internet much more tailored—again—by announcing its new Knowledge Graph that identifies the relationship between words in a query.

In a massive blog post on the official Google Blog, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal announced the new feature, while explaining search has historically been about matching keywords to queries, but that is not the ideal approach in the modern era of search.

According to the Singal:

“Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The SVP further described how the Knowledge Graph helps Google decipher ambiguous language. The feature’s methodology determines whether a user meant Taj Mahal the monument or Taj Mahal the musician when searching “Taj Mahal,” and then it displays a more narrowed list of search results.

The new feature also summarizes relevant content for queries, such as key facts, by examining how a user searched in the past. Therefore, users will not just get a synopsis of important dates and events, but rather specific details regarding history, discovery, or whatever else relates to the query that might specifically interest them.

The video atop demonstrates the Knowledge Graph. Google will initially roll out the feature to United States-based English users, and it will be available on smartphones and tablets.