Knowledge Graph (Google)

Google announced its Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012, as a way to significantly enhance the value of information returned by Google searches. Bengali support was added in March 2017. The Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase. After publication, Google reached out to Search Engine Land to explain that Knowledge Vault was a research report, not an active Google service. Search Engine Land expressed indications that Google was experimenting with "numerous models" for gathering meaning from text. Google's Knowledge Vault was meant to deal with facts, automatically gathering and merging information from across the Internet into a knowledge base capable of answering direct questions, such as "Where was Madonna born?" In a 2014 report, the Vault was reported to have collected over 1.6 billion facts, 271 million of which were considered "confident facts" deemed to be more than 90% true. It was reported to be different from the Knowledge Graph in that it gathered information automatically instead of relying on crowd-sourced facts compiled by humans. == Features ==

Google Knowledge Panel A Google Knowledge Panel which is part of Google search engine result pages, presents an overview of entities such as individuals, organizations, locations, or objects directly within the search interface. This feature uses data from Google Knowledge Graph, an extensive database that organizes and interconnects information about entities, enhancing the retrieval and presentation of relevant content to users. == Criticism ==

Lack of source attribution By May 2016, knowledge boxes were appearing for "roughly one-third" of the 100 billion monthly searches the company processed. Also in 2014, The Daily Dot noted that "Wikipedia still has no real competitor as far as actual content is concerned. All that's up for grabs are traffic stats. And as a nonprofit, traffic numbers don't equate into revenue in the same way they do for a commercial media site". After the article's publication, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, stated that it "welcomes" the knowledge panel functionality, that it was "looking into" the traffic drops, and that "We've also not noticed a significant drop in search engine referrals. We also have a continuing dialog with staff from Google working on the Knowledge Panel". In his 2020 book, Dariusz Jemielniak noted that as most Google users do not realize that many answers to their questions that appear in the Knowledge Graph come from Wikipedia, this reduces Wikipedia's popularity, and in turn limited the site's ability to raise new funds and attract new volunteers. Bias The algorithm has been criticized for presenting biased or inaccurate information, usually because of sourcing information from websites with high search engine optimization. It had been noted in 2014 that while there was a Knowledge Graph for most major historical or pseudo-historical religious figures such as Moses, Muhammad and Gautama Buddha, there was none for Jesus, the central figure of Christianity. On June 3, 2021, a knowledge box identified Kannada as the ugliest language in India, prompting outrage from the Kannada-language community; the state of Karnataka, where most Kannada speakers live, also threatened to sue Google for damaging the public image of the language. Google promptly changed the featured snippet for the search query and issued a formal apology. == See also ==