Google's Ben Gomes Talks About Knowlege Graph

[engine]

It's all about automation.

I'd love it if Google had an option for humans to choose, too.

It's real clever to have a computer do this for us, it's quite an advance.
This is the bit that gets me.

The system is able to figure that out, on the fly, because it has access to users' search activity.

I'd like to choose if I want me previous search activity to be included.

Google's Ben Gomes Talks About Knowlege Graph [fastcompany.com]

Bing's innovations, which involve embedding widgets in search, like an Open Table reservation system, are about turning search into an app, that lets you do things, rather than just find information. Yahoo's innovation is about providing images of search result pages to help you navigate more quickly to the page you want to read. Gomes says Google's innovations, on the other hand, are about helping users perform better searches by, first, helping them quickly let Google know which specific thing they're looking for and then by helping them dive deeper into a topic of interest.

"We show you the information people are most interested in," Gomes says. The system is able to figure that out, on the fly, because it has access to users' search activity. The things that people search for the most are prioritized more highly in the Knowledge Graph. So, for example, if all of a sudden searchers started looking for information on Lloyd Wright's favorite foods, it's conceivable that the panel would start displaying details about those foods, rather information about his children. "Because we know what people are searching for, we know what matters," Gomes says.

[tedster]

While the new panels are Google's first step into using its massive database to improve the search experience, Gomes declines to divulge much detail about what lies down the road. He also seems to indicate the company might not even have a hard and fast road map planned out.

I've recently heard someone say that Google Search is evolving from "keywords" to "key concepts" - and that the Knowledge Graph will mean much more than a few million blurbs they can place in the SERPs.

There certainly is a potential here for a more robust semantic technology, one that could be a major step forward in mapping user searches to more appropriate results. This area has been developing for years, with a major step forward with the n-grams of Phrase Based Indexing [webmasterworld.com].

[martinibuster]

That's a cool thing for them to do. Have they started doing it yet?

I live in Massachusetts. For searches related to fishing, rivers, fishing flys and even moths, Google is repeatedly returning bad results about phrases related to the word MASS (the noun, verb, or adjective)- even though I'm using the full name of the state, Massachusetts. So a search for a river in Massashusetts will also include results for a video game called Mass Effect, a game I do not play nor have shown any interest in. In fact, I don't do any video game searches. Clearly, Google is understanding Massachusetts as Mass, but does not understand that Mass the abbreviation for Massachusetts is different from mass the noun, adjective and verb.