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Things Not Strings -- Google Launches Knowledge Graph

284 points by rryan 14y ago

geoffhill 14y ago
More clutter.
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  Clutter?! How could you call that clutter! Just because they're shoving more information down our throats that we don't want doesn't mean it's clutter! Sure, you still have to find the source of the "summary" to understand it and determine how they got that information so it will make sense to you. But it's better than just giving you the search results which already have the summary! Right? And yeah, the search results already have links to all the different kinds of [taj mahal]. Now you can filter down the top pages to a specific type instead of clicking on the link that matches what you want! It's so easy it takes an extra click! You just don't understand, man. Google knows what you want, even if it isn't what you want. And you'll take it and like it. Psht... clutter.
- hahainternet 14y ago
  More relevant results.
  - mdaniel 14y ago
    And, if I understand this correctly, we can express more accurate and/or complex questions for which we will get those relevant results.
- victork2 14y ago
  I have to agree and even add it's more dangerous than that. Never mind the fact that what attracted me to Google was its sober interface, its minimalist approach of results on the web (that's also why I like Hacker News). Never mind that Google tries to fit more information per inch square for no good reason and sacrifice readability of the "normal result", after all they are still a search engine. But more worrying is that they are going to make assumptions without putting sources[1]. It's a very Orwellian approach to answers and that's something we should grow out of. There's a reason why we need sources: because what's written is just one of the way to see an event or somebody. And Google, really your new Blogspot is awful, useless eye-candy. [1] At least from what's shown on the blog.
  - hahainternet 14y ago
    None of this seems to be accurate. Their 'good reason' is that you searched for this information. That's why they're displaying it, in the most integrated way they can. Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords.
    - hackinthebochs 14y ago
      >Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords. It's legitimate. The point is that showing answers without sources makes Google the de facto "arbiter of truth". When Google's database updates its version of truth, that now becomes what is (or what has always been). There is no indication of different perspectives, or any analysis for how its version of "truth" was derived. That is very Orwellian.
      - hahainternet 14y ago
        I don't believe it is. Google is not the arbiter of truth, they are not dictatorially selecting the truth for the public. They are /searching/ for information and displaying the results of the search. They remain a neutral party in the middle. It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.
        floomp 14y ago
        > It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control. There's a lot of trust in Google with that statement. If this changes, how would you know? That's what's Orwellian about it. It's not hard to imagine the results being silently tweaked by Google - not to say that they will do this, but it's a real danger, because it'd be very bad and hard to detect if they did do this at some point in the future, after we'd all gotten complacent and learned to implicitly trust the results.
        14y ago
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Or more useful information. So far, Google has done an awfully good job of hiding everything not immediately relevant, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.
soupboy 14y ago
I wonder if [http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/05/find-facts-and-do-research-inside.html http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/05/find-facts-and-do-res...] is related. It looks similar, but I can't verify as docs is blocked at my workplace.
- riffraff 14y ago
  I can't try the search, but having tried the one in gdocs: yes it appears to be the same, to the point of showing search results when no factual data is available. (I am baffled that someone would block google docs, you have my sympathy)
DrCatbox 14y ago
Where is this knowledge graph, how do I try it out?
- tcwc 14y ago
  I can't see this yet, but it looks like Google pull most of the structured info from Freebase (which they acquired in 2010). You can play with that at freebase.com.
rabidsnail 14y ago
Quick, everybody download a copy of the freebase dataset before they kill it! On the other hand, I'm glad something is coming out of the metaweb acquisition.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Since the dataset has an open-source (CC-BY) license, I am at a loss to imagine how someone could kill it.
  - rabidsnail 14y ago
    The data that has already been released will be legal to redistribute forever (if there are still copies floating around). But google could decide at any point to stop making new dumps, and to stop hosting the existing ones. That's what I meant by "kill it".
- narphorium 14y ago
  Freebase is not going anywhere but please help yourself to our complete data dumps: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_dumps http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_dumps
gcb 14y ago
didn't they try to launch knowledge graph some ten times after buying metaweb or something already?
diminish 14y ago
Apparently Google is chasing after a knowledge based web now; a semantic web of things. Google may end up sucking Wikipedia albeit categorized and also Wolfram Alpha.
- bergie 14y ago
  Wikipedia is already available in a categorized and semantic format: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About
kjhughes 14y ago
We keep hearing rumblings of the coming semantic web: 2001: Tim Bernes-Lee publishes "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American Magazine 2006: Microsoft acquires Powerset 2009: Microsoft touts Bing as a "decision engine" 2010: Google acquires Metaweb 2012: Google introduces "Knowledge Graph" Is this the big one?
- irickt 14y ago
  2007+: work on machine operable Wikipedia (DBpedia, Semantic MediaWiki, Wikidata) 2010: Apple acquires Siri 2010: Facebook introduces Open Graph 2011: Google, Bing, Yahoo (schema.org) agree to index embedded data
- joshu 14y ago
  you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?
  - sp332 14y ago
    The semantic web allows computers to deal with the "content" of pages instead of just displaying them. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
  - irickt 14y ago
    Any linking provides context thus semantics. Linking to a schema makes this explicit. So it's both, right? Or are you making another point?
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right? I'm having trouble getting your point here. A schema can be thought of as metadata about the data to which it is applied; so "semantics of the schema" are also implicitly "semantics of the data" in a sense. I guess I'm missing some nuance about the point you're trying to make... would you care to elaborate?
  - 14y ago
akg 14y ago
Interestingly there is no mention of G+ or Circles or personalized queries in the post.
mikek 14y ago
As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Once we have a knowledge graph of the world, you will be able to ask questions and get answers, not documents. This will allow so much more automation - personal assistants like Siri will be able to "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean" or "give me a list of the schools all the children of American presidents went to" and so on. There is an arms war here between Bing and Google - we can thank Microsoft for pressuring Google into making this happen sooner than they otherwise would have.
- ralfd 14y ago
  Bing? I Use it not much, have they done something in that direction? I like WolframAlpha.
  - cglace 14y ago
    They bought powerset a few years back and they did that.
- sukuriant 14y ago
  Just to be nitpicky, don't you mean "the key to true", expert-system based AI? Or, are you going the "human intelligence is a clustering system; therefore, true AI would have a similar method" route? Both are valid, I'm just curious.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  I'm not sure if I would want to say "a knowledge graph of the world" is the "key to true AI". I think the situation is closer to "true AI is the key to a usable if situationally depend knowledge graph". Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations. Certainly, you can find a lot of common instances where the average works but once you're past that, you need the kind of understanding of language that present day systems are far from having.
  - jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago
agumonkey 14y ago
I wish people would integrate the punchline into programming languages.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
loverobots 14y ago
In one sentence: More opportunities to show ads within Google.com.
nonameisfinetoo 14y ago
I know you guys usually get all hot and bothered over anything labelled innovative, but wasn't search good enough by 2002? Seriously, when is the last time you struggled to find something using google search?
- ojbyrne 14y ago
  Have you used google lately? Thanks to SEO, the answer to your second question is "about 5 minutes ago."
  - AznHisoka 14y ago
    Please don't associate SEO with spam.
    - jrockway 14y ago
      It's too late for that. Fortunately, white-hat SEO is very easy to describe without mentioning search engines at all: copy editing, fact checking, designing for accessibility, and so on are valuable skills regardless of what algorithms search engines happen to use for ranking today. Write content for your users and you don't have to worry about optimizing for search engines.
    - hollerith 14y ago
      SEO is like spam in that the world would be a better place if there were less of it.
  - moultano 14y ago
    If you have the query handy, I'd love to check it out to debug.
- objclxt 14y ago
  It keeps you on Google's site, and thus provides more exposure to their ads. Let's take the example Google give, a search for 'Matt Groening'. Without this, you'll need to click through the first result (a Wikipedia entry) to find out his date of birth. But with the Knowledge Graph that's right on the results page. You don't need to leave Google at all.
pbw 14y ago
How does this impact site traffic? They are taking popular queries and providing the answer to them on a google.com hosted page. Does that mean less click-throughs to actual result pages? Does that bother anyone?
- jonknee 14y ago
  Since Google makes money on the ad clicks both on SERPs (AdWords) and content (AdSense) it's safe to assume they won't be answering everyone's questions.
  - loverobots 14y ago
    Google gets 100% of Google.com ad money vs 30% or so on Adsense. A major difference I'd say. Plus, some sectors are worth a lot more and you can bet Google is aware of that.
- robryan 14y ago
  I doubt google is making much off these terms anyway, your ROI would be pretty bad because there is no specific intent.
anon1385 14y ago
I note that none of those screenshots contain ads. Perhaps a Googler can enlighten us: do Google employees not get served ads? Or is the author of this blog just using adblock? Or are these images just fake mockups where they left out the ads to make them more aesthetically pleasing and clean looking for PR purposes?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Kylekramer 14y ago
  I just did every search (Taj Mahal, Marie Curie, Matt Groening) they did on my unaltered Firefox/Windows 7 install while logged in, am certainly not a Google employee, and got no ads. Also didn't get the Knowledge Base yet, if that is a factor. Famous locations/people searches don't seem to be stuffed with ads typically. I'd imagine more research style searches having ads would be a bad experience for both the user and advertiser compared to stuff like "cheap flights" which does have an amazing clutter of ads. And of course, picking research style searches presents the idea better. Lack of ads is a nice bonus.
- magicalist 14y ago
  I think it depends on the topic. Searching for Matt Groening, like in the blog post, shows no ads for me.
- jrockway 14y ago
  Google employees get ads. But these new panels do in fact cover them.
- meastham 14y ago
  Many results pages contain no ads. For instance, I just searched for both "Taj Mahal" and "Matt Groening" and received ads for neither query.
- Tuna-Fish 14y ago
  Google search ads are really not in the same business as most traditional advertising. Traditional advertising wants to create desire, and inform people. You take a lot of people and show then things they might be interested in, and hope some of them spend money. What Google search ads do is trafficking intent. Think queries like "cheap hotels in Florida", which clearly communicate that the customer is willing to spend money. They find customers who want something specific, businesses who will sell them that, and make them meet. And then give the people who sell very good analytics that show exactly how much value they are getting, so they can bid up each other for the ads until Google captures almost all the value. During the housing boom, some mortgage-related keywords climbed into mid three figures. That is, each and every time someone searched the matching keywords and clicked on an ad, several hundred dollars changed hands.
vibrunazo 14y ago
FYI, they're using an open API you can use at: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Freebase_API http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Freebase_API Now let's hope they'll also have an API for all the extra semantic info they collect with search.
lunchbox 14y ago
"Things, not strings" does not seem like an effective tagline for marketing this to the public. Are non-programmers used to the term "string" in the sense of "text"? And even for those who are, I still think the tagline is too abstract. I would prefer something like "Understanding the concepts behind the words you search" (or "Understanding the things"). IMO the linked video does a better job at introducing the feature than the article.
- kristianc 14y ago
  From a marketing perspective, its probably a case of tailoring messages to audiences. Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs, and will pick up the Press Release that will have been pushed to the likes of CNN and the BBC.
  - lunchbox 14y ago
    > Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs This is the central "Official Google Blog", not an engineering blog. From the other articles on the blog (most of which are written by marketing and other non-engineering disciplines -- see the last lines), it's pretty clear that the intended audience is anyone who's interested in Google, not just programmers. I know lots of non-programmers who like to read these, especially since a lot of news sites link to and quote these articles.
- j_baker 14y ago
  Personally, I would be more concerned with explaining the term "Knowledge Graph" than I would be concerned with explaining the term "string".
- notatoad 14y ago
  people who don't understand what a string is don't read blog posts like this. they'll see the extra info on the side in their search results and say "oh, that's cool", or "change is scary".
bdr 14y ago
"Marie Curie... 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." Marie got two, one in physics and one in chemistry, the former jointly with Pierre. This is notable because it makes her one of the very few people to receive Nobels in multiple categories.
stevejohnson 14y ago
This reminds me of zero-click info from Duck Duck Go, but deeper. They're showing a summary-like view of information related to your search, but instead of being generated by a bunch of hand-curated rules, they come from more generalized machine learning algorithms. This is real competition for one of my favorite DDG features. I see this as a positive example of search innovation and competition. More globally relevant information, not just a tighter filter bubble.
wololo 14y ago
"I believe AI has an opportunity to achieve a true breakthrough over the coming decade by at last solving the problem of reading natural language text to extract its factual content. In fact, I hereby offer to bet anyone a lobster dinner that by 2015 we will have a computer program capable of automatically reading at least 80% of the factual content across the entire English-speaking web, and placing those facts in a structured knowledge base." --http://www.ai.rutgers.edu/aaai25/mitchell.htm http://www.ai.rutgers.edu/aaai25/mitchell.htm
- boxein 14y ago
  I saw an on-going project recently that was attempting just that. They were using texts from the web to infer relationships from recognizable patterns. Like (the head of X, Y) implies X is an organization, Y is a person, and Y is the leader of X. It would also try to learn new patterns from facts it already knew, like if it notices Jobs and Apple in a sentence it can hypothesize that sentence pattern is about a leader of a company. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the project or even the university, hopefully someone else has heard of this.
  - wololo 14y ago
    Tom Mitchell was talking about his own research. NELL http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/ http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/
jmount 14y ago
A piece of the embarrassment of a number of "Google killers" has been the claim to supply something better than search. It will be interesting to see how Google itself looks under the kind of scrutiny that sort of claim inevitably brings.
ljlolel 14y ago
This is just Wikipedia in-line in results...
SagelyGuru 14y ago
Relationships between facts are also facts. Having more facts enables you to do a slightly better job but I suspect that is all there is to it.
bashzor 14y ago
And that's where Wolfram Alpha became useless. It was just a matter of time after all.
dgudkov 14y ago
Google has power to encourage site owners to make semantic markup for their pages which could lead to higher positions in search results for them. But Google doesn't do it. Why?
- huggah 14y ago
  Google does encourage marking up pages with Microdata, Microformats and RDFa. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... Google publishes tools to help with these. Additionally, better informing Google what your page contains leads to searches for your content being more likely to get to you.
  - dgudkov 14y ago
    Theoretically, yes. However, vast majority of site owners don't do it, even if they are interested in higher positions in SERP. There must be a reason for this.
mkramlich 14y ago
As someone with a brain, I was wondering probably at least as far back as a decade ago why Google wasn't already doing this. The twenty questions approach, in general, is a powerful and simple way to refine a human query in an interactive way.
andrejewski 14y ago
Google's own DuckDuckHack.
JabavuAdams 14y ago
How does this relate to OpenCyc?
barbazfoo12 14y ago
All due respect to Google, but I give primary credit for this to Danny Hillis. He was gathering and processing the data for this project years before going public with it and before merging with Google. It's yet another Google acquisition that is probably going to be viewed by many Google users as another amazing Google innovation. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" Do they still use that slogan?
- Drbble 14y ago
  Google is more about "burying the giants in piles of money, and standing on that."
toksaitov 14y ago
Such a wonderful iPad… http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge...
ladino 14y ago
come on.. the magic is, they simply scrapped Wikipedia!!! :(
geluso 14y ago
Abandon social. Pursue this.
swah 14y ago
Sidenote: interesting how the guys in the video don't look directly at you, but do that lookaway thing, which I associate that with Apple videos ("we're launching this incredibly awesome piece of technology, now available to all of mankind enjoy, you're welcome"). Google, I expected them to look right at the camera and talk to me (for example, like Matt Cutts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4).
ilaksh 14y ago
Cool. Maybe Google could acquire Novamente or Numenta next.

284 points by rryan 14y ago

geoffhill 14y ago

More clutter.

peterwwillis 14y ago
Clutter?! How could you call that clutter! Just because they're shoving more information down our throats that we don't want doesn't mean it's clutter! Sure, you still have to find the source of the "summary" to understand it and determine how they got that information so it will make sense to you. But it's better than just giving you the search results which already have the summary! Right? And yeah, the search results already have links to all the different kinds of [taj mahal]. Now you can filter down the top pages to a specific type instead of clicking on the link that matches what you want! It's so easy it takes an extra click! You just don't understand, man. Google knows what you want, even if it isn't what you want. And you'll take it and like it. Psht... clutter.
hahainternet 14y ago
More relevant results.
- mdaniel 14y ago
  And, if I understand this correctly, we can express more accurate and/or complex questions for which we will get those relevant results.
victork2 14y ago
I have to agree and even add it's more dangerous than that. Never mind the fact that what attracted me to Google was its sober interface, its minimalist approach of results on the web (that's also why I like Hacker News). Never mind that Google tries to fit more information per inch square for no good reason and sacrifice readability of the "normal result", after all they are still a search engine. But more worrying is that they are going to make assumptions without putting sources[1]. It's a very Orwellian approach to answers and that's something we should grow out of. There's a reason why we need sources: because what's written is just one of the way to see an event or somebody. And Google, really your new Blogspot is awful, useless eye-candy. [1] At least from what's shown on the blog.
- hahainternet 14y ago
  None of this seems to be accurate. Their 'good reason' is that you searched for this information. That's why they're displaying it, in the most integrated way they can. Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords.
  - hackinthebochs 14y ago
    >Your use of 'Orwellian' indicates you are just using buzzwords. It's legitimate. The point is that showing answers without sources makes Google the de facto "arbiter of truth". When Google's database updates its version of truth, that now becomes what is (or what has always been). There is no indication of different perspectives, or any analysis for how its version of "truth" was derived. That is very Orwellian.
    - hahainternet 14y ago
      I don't believe it is. Google is not the arbiter of truth, they are not dictatorially selecting the truth for the public. They are /searching/ for information and displaying the results of the search. They remain a neutral party in the middle. It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control.
      - floomp 14y ago
        > It's hard to use 'Orwellian' when the entity you're accusing is entirely dependent upon other sources and exercises no editorial control. There's a lot of trust in Google with that statement. If this changes, how would you know? That's what's Orwellian about it. It's not hard to imagine the results being silently tweaked by Google - not to say that they will do this, but it's a real danger, because it'd be very bad and hard to detect if they did do this at some point in the future, after we'd all gotten complacent and learned to implicitly trust the results.
        14y ago
crazygringo 14y ago
Or more useful information. So far, Google has done an awfully good job of hiding everything not immediately relevant, so I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.

soupboy 14y ago

I wonder if [http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/05/find-facts-and-do-research-inside.html http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2012/05/find-facts-and-do-res...] is related. It looks similar, but I can't verify as docs is blocked at my workplace.

riffraff 14y ago
I can't try the search, but having tried the one in gdocs: yes it appears to be the same, to the point of showing search results when no factual data is available. (I am baffled that someone would block google docs, you have my sympathy)

DrCatbox 14y ago

Where is this knowledge graph, how do I try it out?

tcwc 14y ago
I can't see this yet, but it looks like Google pull most of the structured info from Freebase (which they acquired in 2010). You can play with that at freebase.com.

rabidsnail 14y ago

Quick, everybody download a copy of the freebase dataset before they kill it! On the other hand, I'm glad something is coming out of the metaweb acquisition.

hollerith 14y ago
Since the dataset has an open-source (CC-BY) license, I am at a loss to imagine how someone could kill it.
- rabidsnail 14y ago
  The data that has already been released will be legal to redistribute forever (if there are still copies floating around). But google could decide at any point to stop making new dumps, and to stop hosting the existing ones. That's what I meant by "kill it".
narphorium 14y ago
Freebase is not going anywhere but please help yourself to our complete data dumps: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_dumps http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Data_dumps

gcb 14y ago

didn't they try to launch knowledge graph some ten times after buying metaweb or something already?

diminish 14y ago

Apparently Google is chasing after a knowledge based web now; a semantic web of things. Google may end up sucking Wikipedia albeit categorized and also Wolfram Alpha.

bergie 14y ago
Wikipedia is already available in a categorized and semantic format: http://dbpedia.org/About http://dbpedia.org/About

kjhughes 14y ago

We keep hearing rumblings of the coming semantic web: 2001: Tim Bernes-Lee publishes "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American Magazine 2006: Microsoft acquires Powerset 2009: Microsoft touts Bing as a "decision engine" 2010: Google acquires Metaweb 2012: Google introduces "Knowledge Graph" Is this the big one?

irickt 14y ago
2007+: work on machine operable Wikipedia (DBpedia, Semantic MediaWiki, Wikidata) 2010: Apple acquires Siri 2010: Facebook introduces Open Graph 2011: Google, Bing, Yahoo (schema.org) agree to index embedded data
joshu 14y ago
you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right?
- sp332 14y ago
  The semantic web allows computers to deal with the "content" of pages instead of just displaying them. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/ http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
- irickt 14y ago
  Any linking provides context thus semantics. Linking to a schema makes this explicit. So it's both, right? Or are you making another point?
- mindcrime 14y ago
  you realize that the semantic web is not about the semantics of the data, but instead about the semantics of the schema, right? I'm having trouble getting your point here. A schema can be thought of as metadata about the data to which it is applied; so "semantics of the schema" are also implicitly "semantics of the data" in a sense. I guess I'm missing some nuance about the point you're trying to make... would you care to elaborate?
- 14y ago

akg 14y ago

Interestingly there is no mention of G+ or Circles or personalized queries in the post.

mikek 14y ago

As someone who has done research in the field, I can tell you - this is the future of search, and the key to true AI. Once we have a knowledge graph of the world, you will be able to ask questions and get answers, not documents. This will allow so much more automation - personal assistants like Siri will be able to "book me a room in San Francisco with a view of the ocean" or "give me a list of the schools all the children of American presidents went to" and so on. There is an arms war here between Bing and Google - we can thank Microsoft for pressuring Google into making this happen sooner than they otherwise would have.

ralfd 14y ago
Bing? I Use it not much, have they done something in that direction? I like WolframAlpha.
- cglace 14y ago
  They bought powerset a few years back and they did that.
sukuriant 14y ago
Just to be nitpicky, don't you mean "the key to true", expert-system based AI? Or, are you going the "human intelligence is a clustering system; therefore, true AI would have a similar method" route? Both are valid, I'm just curious.
joe_the_user 14y ago
I'm not sure if I would want to say "a knowledge graph of the world" is the "key to true AI". I think the situation is closer to "true AI is the key to a usable if situationally depend knowledge graph". Because the world doesn't have single knowledge graph that you can learn and use in all situations. Certainly, you can find a lot of common instances where the average works but once you're past that, you need the kind of understanding of language that present day systems are far from having.
- jasonwatkinspdx 14y ago

agumonkey 14y ago

I wish people would integrate the punchline into programming languages.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

loverobots 14y ago

In one sentence: More opportunities to show ads within Google.com.

nonameisfinetoo 14y ago

I know you guys usually get all hot and bothered over anything labelled innovative, but wasn't search good enough by 2002? Seriously, when is the last time you struggled to find something using google search?

ojbyrne 14y ago
Have you used google lately? Thanks to SEO, the answer to your second question is "about 5 minutes ago."
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  Please don't associate SEO with spam.
  - jrockway 14y ago
    It's too late for that. Fortunately, white-hat SEO is very easy to describe without mentioning search engines at all: copy editing, fact checking, designing for accessibility, and so on are valuable skills regardless of what algorithms search engines happen to use for ranking today. Write content for your users and you don't have to worry about optimizing for search engines.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    SEO is like spam in that the world would be a better place if there were less of it.
- moultano 14y ago
  If you have the query handy, I'd love to check it out to debug.
objclxt 14y ago
It keeps you on Google's site, and thus provides more exposure to their ads. Let's take the example Google give, a search for 'Matt Groening'. Without this, you'll need to click through the first result (a Wikipedia entry) to find out his date of birth. But with the Knowledge Graph that's right on the results page. You don't need to leave Google at all.

pbw 14y ago

How does this impact site traffic? They are taking popular queries and providing the answer to them on a google.com hosted page. Does that mean less click-throughs to actual result pages? Does that bother anyone?

jonknee 14y ago
Since Google makes money on the ad clicks both on SERPs (AdWords) and content (AdSense) it's safe to assume they won't be answering everyone's questions.
- loverobots 14y ago
  Google gets 100% of Google.com ad money vs 30% or so on Adsense. A major difference I'd say. Plus, some sectors are worth a lot more and you can bet Google is aware of that.
robryan 14y ago
I doubt google is making much off these terms anyway, your ROI would be pretty bad because there is no specific intent.

anon1385 14y ago

I note that none of those screenshots contain ads. Perhaps a Googler can enlighten us: do Google employees not get served ads? Or is the author of this blog just using adblock? Or are these images just fake mockups where they left out the ads to make them more aesthetically pleasing and clean looking for PR purposes?

deleted 14y ago
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Kylekramer 14y ago
I just did every search (Taj Mahal, Marie Curie, Matt Groening) they did on my unaltered Firefox/Windows 7 install while logged in, am certainly not a Google employee, and got no ads. Also didn't get the Knowledge Base yet, if that is a factor. Famous locations/people searches don't seem to be stuffed with ads typically. I'd imagine more research style searches having ads would be a bad experience for both the user and advertiser compared to stuff like "cheap flights" which does have an amazing clutter of ads. And of course, picking research style searches presents the idea better. Lack of ads is a nice bonus.
magicalist 14y ago
I think it depends on the topic. Searching for Matt Groening, like in the blog post, shows no ads for me.
jrockway 14y ago
Google employees get ads. But these new panels do in fact cover them.
meastham 14y ago
Many results pages contain no ads. For instance, I just searched for both "Taj Mahal" and "Matt Groening" and received ads for neither query.
Tuna-Fish 14y ago
Google search ads are really not in the same business as most traditional advertising. Traditional advertising wants to create desire, and inform people. You take a lot of people and show then things they might be interested in, and hope some of them spend money. What Google search ads do is trafficking intent. Think queries like "cheap hotels in Florida", which clearly communicate that the customer is willing to spend money. They find customers who want something specific, businesses who will sell them that, and make them meet. And then give the people who sell very good analytics that show exactly how much value they are getting, so they can bid up each other for the ads until Google captures almost all the value. During the housing boom, some mortgage-related keywords climbed into mid three figures. That is, each and every time someone searched the matching keywords and clicked on an ad, several hundred dollars changed hands.

vibrunazo 14y ago

FYI, they're using an open API you can use at: http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Freebase_API http://wiki.freebase.com/wiki/Freebase_API Now let's hope they'll also have an API for all the extra semantic info they collect with search.

lunchbox 14y ago

"Things, not strings" does not seem like an effective tagline for marketing this to the public. Are non-programmers used to the term "string" in the sense of "text"? And even for those who are, I still think the tagline is too abstract. I would prefer something like "Understanding the concepts behind the words you search" (or "Understanding the things"). IMO the linked video does a better job at introducing the feature than the article.

kristianc 14y ago
From a marketing perspective, its probably a case of tailoring messages to audiences. Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs, and will pick up the Press Release that will have been pushed to the likes of CNN and the BBC.
- lunchbox 14y ago
  > Non-programmers will likely not be poking around on Google's engineering blogs This is the central "Official Google Blog", not an engineering blog. From the other articles on the blog (most of which are written by marketing and other non-engineering disciplines -- see the last lines), it's pretty clear that the intended audience is anyone who's interested in Google, not just programmers. I know lots of non-programmers who like to read these, especially since a lot of news sites link to and quote these articles.
j_baker 14y ago
Personally, I would be more concerned with explaining the term "Knowledge Graph" than I would be concerned with explaining the term "string".
notatoad 14y ago
people who don't understand what a string is don't read blog posts like this. they'll see the extra info on the side in their search results and say "oh, that's cool", or "change is scary".

bdr 14y ago

"Marie Curie... 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." Marie got two, one in physics and one in chemistry, the former jointly with Pierre. This is notable because it makes her one of the very few people to receive Nobels in multiple categories.

stevejohnson 14y ago

This reminds me of zero-click info from Duck Duck Go, but deeper. They're showing a summary-like view of information related to your search, but instead of being generated by a bunch of hand-curated rules, they come from more generalized machine learning algorithms. This is real competition for one of my favorite DDG features. I see this as a positive example of search innovation and competition. More globally relevant information, not just a tighter filter bubble.

wololo 14y ago

"I believe AI has an opportunity to achieve a true breakthrough over the coming decade by at last solving the problem of reading natural language text to extract its factual content. In fact, I hereby offer to bet anyone a lobster dinner that by 2015 we will have a computer program capable of automatically reading at least 80% of the factual content across the entire English-speaking web, and placing those facts in a structured knowledge base." --http://www.ai.rutgers.edu/aaai25/mitchell.htm http://www.ai.rutgers.edu/aaai25/mitchell.htm

boxein 14y ago
I saw an on-going project recently that was attempting just that. They were using texts from the web to infer relationships from recognizable patterns. Like (the head of X, Y) implies X is an organization, Y is a person, and Y is the leader of X. It would also try to learn new patterns from facts it already knew, like if it notices Jobs and Apple in a sentence it can hypothesize that sentence pattern is about a leader of a company. For the life of me I cannot remember the name of the project or even the university, hopefully someone else has heard of this.
- wololo 14y ago
  Tom Mitchell was talking about his own research. NELL http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/ http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/

jmount 14y ago

A piece of the embarrassment of a number of "Google killers" has been the claim to supply something better than search. It will be interesting to see how Google itself looks under the kind of scrutiny that sort of claim inevitably brings.

ljlolel 14y ago

This is just Wikipedia in-line in results...

SagelyGuru 14y ago

Relationships between facts are also facts. Having more facts enables you to do a slightly better job but I suspect that is all there is to it.

bashzor 14y ago

And that's where Wolfram Alpha became useless. It was just a matter of time after all.

dgudkov 14y ago

Google has power to encourage site owners to make semantic markup for their pages which could lead to higher positions in search results for them. But Google doesn't do it. Why?

huggah 14y ago
Google does encourage marking up pages with Microdata, Microformats and RDFa. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&#38... Google publishes tools to help with these. Additionally, better informing Google what your page contains leads to searches for your content being more likely to get to you.
- dgudkov 14y ago
  Theoretically, yes. However, vast majority of site owners don't do it, even if they are interested in higher positions in SERP. There must be a reason for this.

mkramlich 14y ago

As someone with a brain, I was wondering probably at least as far back as a decade ago why Google wasn't already doing this. The twenty questions approach, in general, is a powerful and simple way to refine a human query in an interactive way.

andrejewski 14y ago

Google's own DuckDuckHack.

JabavuAdams 14y ago

How does this relate to OpenCyc?

barbazfoo12 14y ago

All due respect to Google, but I give primary credit for this to Danny Hillis. He was gathering and processing the data for this project years before going public with it and before merging with Google. It's yet another Google acquisition that is probably going to be viewed by many Google users as another amazing Google innovation. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" Do they still use that slogan?

Drbble 14y ago
Google is more about "burying the giants in piles of money, and standing on that."

toksaitov 14y ago

Such a wonderful iPad… http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge...

ladino 14y ago

come on.. the magic is, they simply scrapped Wikipedia!!! :(

geluso 14y ago

Abandon social. Pursue this.

swah 14y ago

Sidenote: interesting how the guys in the video don't look directly at you, but do that lookaway thing, which I associate that with Apple videos ("we're launching this incredibly awesome piece of technology, now available to all of mankind enjoy, you're welcome"). Google, I expected them to look right at the camera and talk to me (for example, like Matt Cutts here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofhwPC-5Ub4).

ilaksh 14y ago

Cool. Maybe Google could acquire Novamente or Numenta next.