Google revamps search, tries to think more like a person
By Doug Gross, CNN
updated 7:28 PM EDT, Wed May 16, 2012
With Knowledge Graph, a Google search will ask if you
want the galaxy, TV show or rock band
(CNN) -- So, let's say you're doing a Google search for
"Kings." Did you mean the L.A. hockey team or the Sacramento
basketball team? Maybe the TV show? Or maybe you actually wanted to know
something about monarchs.
Google on Wednesday announced Knowledge Graph, a
significant change to how search results are delivered that the company
believes will make their search engine think more like a human.
"The web pages we [currently] return for the search
'kings,' they're all good," Jack Menzel, director of product management at
Google, told CNN in an interview. "You, as a human, associate those words
with their real-world meaning but, for a computer, they're just a random string
of characters."
With Knowledge Graph, which will begin rolling out to
some users immediately, results will be arranged according to categories with
which the search term has been associated. So, in the above example, boxes will
appear with separate results for the hockey team, basketball team and TV show.
The user can then click on one of those boxes to only get
results for the specific topic they were searching.
"It hones your search results right in on the task
that you're after," Menzel said.
More specific searches, say for the name of a celebrity,
will render boxes with basic information, as well as links to what Google
believes are possibly related searches.
Menzel says the initial version of Knowledge Graph has
information on 500 million people, places and things and uses 3.5 billion
defining attributes and connections to create categories for them.
The feature will begin rolling out as early as Wednesday
afternoon for some users in the United States and eventually be available on
desktop, mobile and tablet searches. It will first become available in English,
then in other languages, Menzel said.
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