Knowledge Graph: Google’s knowledge graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a semantic database. In it, entities are established to a thematic context, or what is the same based on an ontology. The Google knowledge graph is or aims to be a massive encyclopedia of universal knowledge organized according to thematic and semantic criteria. It is not intended to incorporate new content in other sources known to all but to reclassify and contextualize said information.

So, what is an entity for Google?

“…A named entity is a group of one or more words…that identifies an entity by its name. For example, named entities may include people… organizations (such as the name of a corporation…), places…, artifacts (such as names of consumer products),… specific dates, events… and monetary expressions…”

So, in favour of what was mentioned, there is an extensive list of types of entities: books, events, State Institutions, movies, places, etc…

Entities are essential for collecting information, as they allow you to include additional data about the context of a query and thus help with different tasks such as:

• Interpret search queries
• Clarify the analysis of terms with multiple meanings
• Identify the relationships between entities and their importance in terms of thematic context
• Interpret documents
• Identify relevant entities in an area of ​​knowledge

And Where does Google get the information from?

Knowledge Graph was initially fed with Freebase (semantic knowledge database) and Wikipedia data. Later, this open project was transformed into the Wikidata project.

Google uses the latter as proof of the relevance of an entity. In this way, Wikipedia articles and Wikidata entries play a fundamental role as a source of information for many tables in the knowledge graph.

Although these are not the only sites you get information from, you also rely on:

• CIA World Factbook,
• Google+ and Google My Business
• Structured data
• Web Crawling
• Knowledge Vault
• Licensed data

Even so, it is necessary to differentiate the sources of information between them since those referred to by Google+ or Google My Business can be created and controlled to a large extent by a company.

 And why does Google’s Knowledge Graph exist?

 On its page, Google itself talks a little about it.

Emily Moxley (manager): “If you’re looking for the answer to a question, chances are others have already searched for the same thing on Google. We can help you in your research by combining the information others have found useful with the information in the knowledge graph.”

What Google seeks with Knowledge Graph is to link knowledge and create relationships between it. In other words, it identifies entities and relates them to each other to place them in a context or ontology.

Shashi Thakur (Technical Lead at Google): “One of the first things we will introduce to the knowledge graph is a panel next to the web results.”

So, if, for example, we search on Google for Marie Curie, we will find different images and information about her to our right. Still, other characters related to her and science will also appear. Likewise, questions about the character/entity we have searched for are included. These questions refer to possible questions other users have asked about the topic we are searching for.

For all this, we must remember when working on our SEO positioning and optimizing a post to improve its visibility that context is more important than using unrelated keywords.