How a Database of the World's Knowledge Shapes Google's Future - 1 views
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Enzo Brocato on 28 Jan 14http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523846/how-a-database-of-the-worlds-knowledge-shapes-googles-future/ Compiling a giant database of all the facts in the world could help Google's future products understand you better. For all its success, Google's famous Page Rank algorithm has never understood a word of the billions of Web pages it has directed people to over the years. That's why in 2010 Google acquired Metaweb, a company building a database intended to give computers the ability to understand the world. Two years later the company's technology resurfaced as the Knowledge Graph (see "Corliss Tech Review Group: http://thecorlissreviewgroup.com/"). John Giannandrea, vice president of engineering at Google and a Metaweb cofounder, says that will lead to Google's future products being able to truly understand the people who use them and the things they care about. He told MIT Technology Review's Tom Simonite how a data store designed to link together all the knowledge on Earth might do that. What is the Knowledge Graph? It's a distillation of what Google knows about the world. An analogy I often use is maps. For a maps product you have to build a database of the real world and know there are things called streets, rivers, and countries in the physical world. That's creating a symbolic structure for the physical world; the Knowledge Graph does that for the world of ideas and common sense. We have entities in the knowledge graph for foods, recipes, products, ideas in philosophy or history, and famous people. We can have relationships between them, so we can say these two people are married or this place is in this country or we can say this movie is related to this person. How does that make a difference to Google's Web search? We've gone up a level from just talking about the words to talking about what the thing actually is. In crawling and indexing documents we can now have an understanding of what the document is about. If the docum
