Google’s Knowledge Graph
In class we learned how search engines work and the network they work in. We learned search engines gather information from various sites and pages and ranks each web page based on its relevance and connectivity to the search and network. The web pages with the highest scores are the first to show up under results since they are the most relevant. This was very interesting to learn about and sparked my curiosity in the topic.
I stumbled upon an article written in The Times of India back in August. I started to read the article, and it discussed Google’s new Knowledge Graph it launched back in May. The article was rather interesting as it discussed how this will revolutionize the way Search Engines run searches. Right now, when we execute a search using one of the many search engines available, we still have to sort through the results to find what we are actually looking for. But with Google’s Knowledge Graph, Google is now able to take a search and apply it to real things such as buildings, people, places etc. It is actually an incredible concept and got me to do further research on this “Knowledge Graph.”
What Google’s Knowledge Graph allows Google to do, is take what a person is searching for, and understand that the search is for something in real life, not just look for relevent pages that contain those words as it previously did. So when searching for a specific person, rather than searching for pages with the same words (his/her name), it understands the search is for a specific person, and gathers information on the person. It then gathers other information available that is relevant to the search. Google is now able to associate searches with their real counter parts and gather relevent information on that search. This allows Google to now to a better job of identifying what exactly you are searching for.
I am excited to see how this technology develops and changes the way we get our search results using a Network as extensive as the Internet. Below are links to the article and a link to Google’s webpage explaining how the Knowledge Graph works.
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Sources:
Article: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-08-09/internet/33117470_1_knowledge-graph-search-history-search-engine
Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html