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Google’s new push to make sense of the Web in terms of “things, not strings,” to use the company’s catchphrase. Instead of just indexing Web documents by the words they contain, “we really need to understand about things in the real world,” says Shashi Thakur, technical lead on the Knowledge Graph project, which some see as a stepping stone to a long-sought system called the Semantic Web.

Google’s Knowledge Graph adds a new dimension to searches, because the company now keeps track of what many search terms mean. That’s what allows the system to recognize the connection between Margaret Thatcher (the person) and Grantham (her place of birth)—not because the two strings show up together on a lot of Web pages.

reebase was just one building block Google used to create Knowledge Graph. “We’re definitely open to using any data we have privileges to use,” says Thakur, who gives the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia as examples of other collections of public knowledge that he and his colleagues tapped. He says that Google has also licensed certain data sets and points out that the company has some large data sets developed internally—the information collected for Google Maps, for example. “All of those go into the Knowledge Graph,” says Thakur.

The first time I can remember feeling like I didn’t exist, I was 15. I was sitting on a train and all of a sudden I felt like I’d been dropped into someone else’s body. My memories, experiences, and feelings—the things that make up my intrinsic sense of “me-ness”—projected across my mind like phantasmagoria, but I felt like they belonged to someone else. Like I was experiencing life in the third person.

It’s characterized by a pervasive and disturbing sense of unreality in both the experience of self (called “depersonalization”) and one’s surroundings (known as “derealization”); accounts of it are surreal, obscure, shrouded in terms like “unreality” and “dream,” but they’re often conveyed with an almost incongruous lucidity.

It’s not a psychotic condition; the sufferers are aware that what they’re perceiving is unusual. “We call it an ‘as if’ disorder. People say they feel as if they’re in a movie, as if they’re a robot,” Medford says.

Google on Thursday announced one of the biggest changes to its search engine, a rewriting of its algorithm to handle more complex queries that affects 90 percent of all searches.

The company made the changes, executives said, because Google users are asking increasingly long and complex questions and are searching Google more often on mobile phones with voice search.

“They said, ‘Let’s go back and basically replace the engine of a 1950s car,’ ” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog. “It’s fair to say the general public seemed not to have noticed that Google ripped out its engine while driving down the road and replaced it with something else.

A half decade ago, the world’s leading A.I. labs built systems that could identify objects in digital images and even generate images on their own, including flowers, dogs, cars and faces. A few years later, they built systems that could do much the same with written language, summarizing articles, answering questions, generating tweets and even writing blog posts.

DALL-E is a notable step forward because it juggles both language and images and, in some cases, grasps the relationship between the two

“We can now use multiple, intersecting streams of information to create better and better technology,”