Tech of the Week | SmartCompliance | The Google Knowledge Graph

It seems the search results displayed before us become more intuitive by the day. It's easy to overlook the significance of those improvements, afterall, it's just 'Google improving the algorithm." But there's a lot more to it than that. This week we'd like to highlight the importance of search engine technology and where it's headed - because let's face it, it's probably the technology we use most every day. 

Google has traditionally read your query and found any instances where that query was replicated, related or not. Now they are working on improving not only the quality of those results, but the understanding. 

"Eventually Google transitioned from examining keywords to meaning. “We realized that the words ‘New’ and ‘York’ appearing next to each other suddenly changed the meaning of both those words.” Google developed statistical heuristics that recognized that those two words appearing together is a new kind of word. However, Google really did not yet understand that New York is a city, with a population and particular location. "

"Google now wants to transform words that appear on a page into entities that mean something and have related attributes. It’s what the human brain does naturally, but for computers, it’s known as Artificial Intelligence.

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal."

"In 2010, Google purchased Freebase, a community-built knowledge base packed with some 12 million canonical entities. Twelve million is a good start, but Google has, according to Singhal, invested dramatically to “build a huge knowledge graph of interconnected entities and their attributes.” 

So we're looking at a future of search that includes not just reading but interpreting our questions. Combining such a "knowledge database" of technology with things like software, social media, and even robotics would mean a whole new era of interacting with the world and its information. Trust us, this could be big.

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