Last week, Microsoft announced that it had made major changes to its Bing search service, including adding Facebook posts to its search results. Now Google has announced it will be adding its own major new feature to its search engine. It"s called Knowledge Graph and it"s supposed to offer more than just the standard results to a search query.
In a post on Google"s blog, the company said it has created a database of "500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects." The biggest change for Google users is that when they type in a word or phrase, they will not only see the standard search results but they will also see related information about that search query in a box to the right of the normal search results.
Google"s blog gives an example of how Knowledge Graph will work:
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.
The new Knowledge Graph feature will be gradually rolled out to US users; there"s no word yet on when it will be available for other countries. In addition, it"s also being pushed out to Android and iOS devices.