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A store of information dubbed the "Knowledge Graph" now adds useful context and detail to the list of links that Google serves up. Searching for certain people, places, or things produces a box of facts alongside the regular results. The Knowledge Graph is already starting to appear in a few other Google products, and could be used to add intelligence to all of the company's software. "Search was mostly based on matching words and phrases, and not what they actually mean," says Shashidar Thakur, the tech lead for the Knowledge Graph in Google's search team. Thakur says the project was invented to change that. The Knowledge Graph can be thought of as a vast database that allows Google's software to connect facts on people, places, and things to one another. Google got the Knowledge Graph project started when it bought a startup called Metaweb in 2010; at that time, the resource contained only 12 million entries. Today it has more than 500 million entries, with more than 3.5 billion links between them.

"The Knowledge Graph also helps us understand the relationships between things. Marie Curie is a person in the Knowledge Graph, and she 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. All of these are linked in our graph. It's not just a catalog of objects; it also models all these inter-relationships. It's the intelligence between these different entities that's the key."

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about-landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more-and instantly get information that's relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Get an under the hood look at the next frontier in Search, from the team at Google behind the technology. The Knowledge Graph is a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they're connected to one another. With this technology, Google can get you the best possible answers and help jump start your discovery.

La semaine dernière, la frénésie autour de l'IPO de Facebook était a son apogée et qui a fait passé presque inaperçu un changement majeur pour le web : l'évolution du fonctionnement de la recherche de Google (Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings).

Google has opened its Knowledge Graph to the English-speaking world and has made intelligent voice search possible on mobile phones. Underneath it all, of course, are ever more-complex methods of analyzing data to make search smarter and easier than it has any business being.