10/27/2020 Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

The Keyword

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Introducing the
Knowledge
Graph: things, not
strings
Amit Singhal
SVP, Engineering

Published May 16, 2012

Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your
horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m
really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new
information quickly and easily.

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”—

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10/27/2020 Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not
strings. The Keyword
The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google
knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical
features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information
that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next
generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and
understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia
and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re
focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500
million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between
these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find
out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:

1. Find the right thing

Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the
musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results
just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of
results:

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10/27/2020 Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

This is one way the Knowledge Graph makes Google Search more intelligent—your
The Keyword
results are more relevant because we understand these entities, and the nuances in their
meaning, the way you do.

2. Get the best summary

With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can
summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for
that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she
was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go
back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each
item. For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote,
whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what
buildings he designed.

The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie
Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she had two children, one of whom also
won a Nobel Prize, as well as a husband, Pierre Curie, who claimed a third Nobel Prize for
the family. All of these are linked in our graph. It’s not just a catalog of objects; it also
models all these inter-relationships. It’s the intelligence between these different entities
that’s the key.

3. Go deeper and broader

Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some
unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a
whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons
(one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s
a bit of a surprise:
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10/27/2020 Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

The Keyword

We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you
mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer
your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by
what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom
Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the
most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the
magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger , the
debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the
Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one
that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!

We’ve begun to gradually roll out this view of the Knowledge Graph to U.S. English users.
It’s also going to be available on smartphones and tablets—read more about how we’ve
tailored this to mobile devices. And watch our video (also available on our site about the
Knowledge Graph) that gives a deeper dive into the details and technology, in the words
of people who've worked on this project:

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10/27/2020 Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

The Keyword

Introducing the Knowledge Graph

We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest,
provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of
our first baby step—the Knowledge Graph—which will enable us to make search more
intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of
building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you
can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love.

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