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Google has introduced the “Knowledge Graph“, a new search tool that displays Wikipedia-style data about the searched query next to the regular search results and adds search suggestions based on people’s previous searches. The Knowledge Graph search results are currently limited to English queries about “landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more”.

Google’s Knowledge Graph pools of wisdom were created using “public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook” and with the help of “500 million objects  3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects… tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.”

Image source: Google blog

The Knowledge Graph is the “first step towards building the next generation of search”, wrote Amit Singhal (software engineer at Google Inc., a Google Fellow, and the head of Google’s core ranking team who was born in Jhansi and graduated from the Cornell University in 1996), and it has three main purposes:

1. Provide accurate results to ambiguous search queries. For example, if you’re searched for “House”, Google will assume that you were interested in the TV series and not the House of Representatives or house music.

2. Summarize relevant content and key facts about the search query. If you Googled a historic figure name you know nothing about, you will find the basics without clicking on any of the search results links.

3. Provide additional facts and search ideas “answer your next question before you’ve asked it” said Singhal and referred to the “People also search for” box that contains search suggestions based on topic relevancy.

Another way of seeing it is that Google is using the information gathered from all the websites it has been indexing, and all the private data it collected during the recent Privacy Policy change to keep users on Google website and save them the trouble of clicking the search results links. It should be noted that for now, the search results on Google Knowledge Graph do not feature advertisements.