Google today announced the latest enhancement to its industry-leading search – a new feature designed to help users find the right information faster and with less fuss.  Enter the “Knowledge Graph”.  More than a mere update to the seach interface, it is a radical and interesting change to the way Google will deliver your results. 

The easiest way to explain what Knowledge Graph does is through a simple example.

Let’s say you wanted to search for information on the baseball team, “The Rockies”.  You may have baseball on your mind, but Google is no mind reader (or at least not yet).  In the current iteration of its search engine, simply searching for “The Rockies” will return a standard results list containing links to sites on the team, the mountain range, and several related institutions such as schools.  It’s a great results list, but you still have to do the legwork to get to just the stuff on the team.  Sure you could enter more terms, like “baseball”, to focus your search.  But wouldn’t it be sweet if Google actually knew the difference?  Thanks to the Knowledge Graph, it will!

When the new Knowledge Graph rolls out (and the roll-out has started!), Google will return those results in a compartmentalized fashion.  The results related to the baseball team will be kept together.  So will those regarding the mountains.  By choosing that grouping, you will limit the search to just the set you want.  Pretty cool!

My example was a simple one.  In its news release, Google used an even better one.  Their demonstration uses the term “Taj Mahal” and then asks whether you meant the landmark in India, the singer, or evern the Indian restaurant down the street.  Pretty profound differences, no?  It’s an innovative approach to results delivery.

Stay tuned . . . you will soon be seeing the Knowledge Graph on a screen near you.  It began rolling out in the USA today!