Google Knowledge Graph

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Knowledge panel data about Thomas Jefferson displayed on Google Search, as of January 2015 Google Knowledge Panel.png
Knowledge panel data about Thomas Jefferson displayed on Google Search, as of January 2015

The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base from which Google serves relevant information in an infobox beside its search results. This allows the user to see the answer in a glance, as an instant answer. The data is generated automatically from a variety of sources, covering places, people, businesses, and more. [1] [2]

Contents

The information covered by Google's Knowledge Graph grew quickly after launch, tripling its data size within seven months (covering 570 million entities and 18 billion facts [3] ). By mid-2016, Google reported that it held 70 billion facts [4] and answered "roughly one-third" of the 100 billion monthly searches they handled. By May 2020, this had grown to 500 billion facts on 5 billion entities. [5]

There is no official documentation of how the Google Knowledge Graph is implemented. [6] According to Google, its information is retrieved from many sources, including the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia. [7] It is used to answer direct spoken questions in Google Assistant [8] [9] and Google Home voice queries. [10] It has been criticized for providing answers with neither source attribution nor citations. [11]

History

Google announced its Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012, as a way to significantly enhance the value of information returned by Google searches. [7] Initially available only in English, it was expanded in December 2012 to Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Italian. [12] Bengali support was added in March 2017. [13]

The Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase. [7]

In August 2014, New Scientist reported that Google had launched a Knowledge Vault project. [14] 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. [15]

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. [15]

Features

Google Knowledge Panel

A Google Knowledge Panel [16] 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, [17] 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. [11] Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, told The Washington Post that Google's omission of sources in its knowledge boxes "undermines people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions". The publication also reported that the boxes are "frequently unattributed", such as a knowledge box on the age of actress Betty White, which is "as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God". [11]

Declining Wikipedia article readership

According to The Register in 2014 the display of direct answers in knowledge panels alongside Google search results caused significant readership declines for Wikipedia, from which the panels obtained some of their information. [18] 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". [19]

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. [20]

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. [21] [22] 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. [23] [24]

See also

Related Research Articles

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., abbreviated WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, the seventh most visited website in the world. It also hosts fourteen similar projects and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software that underpins them all. The Foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund his crowdsourced wiki projects. They had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales's for-profit company.

Freebase was a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of data composed mainly by its community members. It was an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual, user-submitted wiki contributions. Freebase aimed to create a global resource that allowed people to access common information more effectively. It was developed by the American software company Metaweb and run publicly beginning in March 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in a private sale announced on 16 July 2010. Google's Knowledge Graph is powered in part by Freebase.

Evi is a technology company in Cambridge, England, founded by William Tunstall-Pedoe, which specialises in knowledge base and semantic search engine software. Its first product was an answer engine that aimed to directly answer questions on any subject posed in plain English text, which is accomplished using a database of discrete facts. The True Knowledge Answer engine was launched for private beta testing and development on 7 November 2007.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to knowledge:

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikidata</span> Free knowledge database project

Wikidata is a collaboratively edited multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. It is a common source of open data that Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, and anyone else, is able to use under the CC0 public domain license. Wikidata is a wiki powered by the software MediaWiki, including its extension for semi-structured data, the Wikibase. As of mid-2024, Wikidata had 1.57 billion item statements.

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Knowledge Engine (KE) was a search engine project initiated in 2015 by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to locate and display verifiable and trustworthy information from public-information sources in a way that was less reliant on traditional search engines. It aimed to allow readers to stay on Wikipedia.org and other Wikipedia-related projects when looking for additional information rather than turning to proprietary search engines. Its goal was to protect user privacy, to be open and transparent about how its information originates, and to allow access to related metadata.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knowledge graph</span> Type of knowledge base

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data Commons</span> Knowledge repository integrating open datasets

Data Commons is an open-source platform created by Google that provides an open knowledge graph, combining economic, scientific and other public datasets into a unified view. Ramanathan V. Guha, a creator of web standards including RDF, RSS, and Schema.org, founded the project, which is now led by Prem Ramaswami.

References

  1. ↑ "About knowledge panels - Knowledge Panel Help". Google Support. Retrieved March 15, 2021.
  2. ↑ "Your business information in the Knowledge Panel". Google My Business Help. Google Inc. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  3. ↑ Newton, Casey (December 4, 2012). "Google's Knowledge Graph tripled in size in seven months". CNET . CBS Interactive . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  4. ↑ Vincent, James (October 4, 2016). "Apple boasts about sales; Google boasts about how good its AI is". The Verge . Vox Media . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  5. ↑ "A reintroduction to our Knowledge Graph and knowledge panels". Google blog. May 20, 2020. Retrieved May 26, 2020. It's a system that understands facts and information about entities from materials shared across the web, as well as from open source and licensed databases. It has amassed over 500 billion facts about five billion entities.
  6. ↑ Ehrlinger, Lisa; Wöß, Wolfram (2016). "Towards a Definition of Knowledge Graphs" (PDF).
  7. 1 2 3 Singhal, Amit (May 16, 2012). "Introducing the Knowledge Graph: Things, Not Strings". Google Official Blog. Retrieved September 6, 2014.
  8. ↑ Lynley, Matthew (May 18, 2016). "Google unveils Google Assistant, a virtual assistant that's a big upgrade to Google Now". TechCrunch . Oath Inc. Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  9. ↑ Kovach, Steve (October 4, 2016). "Google is going to win the next major battle in computing". Business Insider . Axel Springer SE . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  10. ↑ Bohn, Dieter (May 18, 2016). "Google Home: a speaker to finally take on the Amazon Echo". The Verge . Vox Media . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  11. 1 2 3 Dewey, Caitlin (May 11, 2016). "You Probably Haven't Even Noticed Google's Sketchy Quest to Control the World's Knowledge". The Washington Post . Archived from the original on June 3, 2016. Retrieved May 25, 2022.
  12. ↑ Newton, Casey (December 14, 2012). "How Google is taking the Knowledge Graph global". CNET . CBS Interactive . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  13. ↑ "Making it easier to Search in Bengali". Official Google India Blog. Retrieved January 26, 2018.
  14. ↑ Hodson, Hal (August 20, 2014). "Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank". New Scientist . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  15. 1 2 Sterling, Greg (August 25, 2014). "Google "Knowledge Vault" To Power Future Of Search". Search Engine Land . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  16. ↑ Browne, Ryan (December 10, 2020). "Google launches knowledge panels in search results to tackle misinformation about Covid vaccines". CNBC. Retrieved August 28, 2024.
  17. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (May 16, 2012). "Google Just Got A Whole Lot Smarter, Launches Its Knowledge Graph". TechCrunch. Retrieved August 28, 2024.
  18. ↑ Orlowski, Andrew (January 13, 2014). "Google stabs Wikipedia in the front". The Register . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  19. ↑ Kloc, Joe (January 8, 2014). "Is Google accidentally killing Wikipedia?". The Daily Dot . Retrieved December 10, 2017.
  20. ↑ Jemielniak, Dariusz; Przegalinska, Aleksandra (February 18, 2020). Collaborative Society. MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-35645-9.
  21. ↑ Schwartz, Barry (July 8, 2014). "Why Does Google Exclude Jesus Christ From The Knowledge Graph". Search Engine Roundtable. Retrieved May 29, 2016.
  22. ↑ Wolford, Josh (July 8, 2014). "Google Has a Jesus-Shaped Hole in Its Graph". WebProNews. Retrieved May 29, 2016.
  23. ↑ "Why Google showed Kannada as 'ugliest language of India': Explained". Hindustan Times. June 4, 2021.
  24. ↑ Ives, Mike; Mozur, Paul (June 4, 2021). "India's 'Ugliest' Language? Google Had an Answer (and Drew a Backlash)". The New York Times.
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