When you search, you’re not just looking for a webpage. You’re looking to get answers, understand concepts and explore.
Google says it has compiled over 3.5 billion facts, which include information about and relationships between 500 million objects or “entities,” as it sometimes calls them. In general, entities are persons, places and things.
The next frontier in search is to understand real-world things and the relationships among them. So we’re building a Knowledge Graph: a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they’re connected to one another.
This is how we’ll be able to tell if your search for “mercury” refers to the planet or the chemical element–and also how we can get you smarter answers to jump start your discovery.
See it in action
When you search for things, people, or places that Google knows about, we can use the Knowledge Graph to enhance your search results.
Find the right thing
The words you search with can often have more than one meaning. With the Knowledge Graph we can understand the difference, and help you narrow your results to find just the answers you’re looking for.
Get the best summary
See key facts about your search with the most useful and interesting information for that particular topic, based on the questions other people have asked.
Go deeper and broader
Make unexpected discoveries and explore a topic more deeply with a springboard of information at your fingertips. What you find may surprise you!
When you search on Google for a person, place, or thing, you might see a section to the right of your search results that highlights facts, photos, and other snippets of information about your search. Use this section to find quick information and facts about the subject or to start exploring related subjects.
To give it a try, search for your favorite movie, landmark, historical figure, or try one of these: [ Eiffel Tower ], [ Wayne's World ], [ dalmatian ], [ Galileo ]. You can also search by image to see this section of facts and information.
What you’ll see
In the right-hand section, you might find a short description, image, list of facts, location map, and links to similar searches. For question-related searches like [ tallest building in the world ], you can also see the answer right there on the search page.
Here are some of the types of information that you might see:
Descriptions and facts that are publicly available on the Web
Images from the Web that are selected as the highest ranking images about the subject
Related searches to help you explore similar subjects, such as other Paris monuments when you search for the Eiffel Tower
Other information that’s related to the subject, such as a map of a location, upcoming events for an artist or venue, and the latest Google+ posts for some people
For now, this section of information appears only for certain types of searches about a person, place, or thing. For example, while you won’t see it appear for searches on companies, video games, and cars, you can often see it for searches about a book, movie, sports team, location, dog breed, roller coaster, or famous person.
When you search, our system considers the top search results and the content that’s found in each of those webpages. If many of the top results appear to have a specific theme in common, we’ll show a summary of information about that shared subject. In cases such as [ Cinderella ], you might see a few options appear in the summary box to help narrow down your search, such as when you search for the name of a book that’s also a movie.
Sounds like Google is now trying to take a peace of Wiki.
