The Google Knowledge Graph implementation is one of the most powerful tools Google offers webmasters. With it, you can provide context to searchers by connecting keywords and phrases together. This increased understanding of search queries can lead to better understanding of your on-site optimizations by both Google and users.
For example, say you’re looking for information about the latest iPhone models. You might enter “iPhone 8,” “iPhone 7,” and “iPhone X.” A knowledge graph could show you the different types of iPhones, their features, and even where you can buy them. This makes searching much better because now you don’t just see a list of products, you learn what those products are and why people use them.
Knowledge graphs are powered by semantic data and markup, which helps make connections between concepts and ideas. In fact, the Knowledge Graph leverages structured data about topics, such as movie reviews, sports scores, and product ratings. This allows Google to extract meaning from unstructured data and present it in a way that’s useful to searchers.
It also helps speed up search and provides a significantly better method of organization as a result.
What Is Google’s Knowledge Graph?
A knowledge graph is a way to organize information into topics, giving context to data. When you search for something specific, such as “how do I fix my car,” you’re looking for information on how to repair cars. If you want to know why people love cats, you’d look up “why do people love cats.” And if you wanted to learn about the history of the United States, you might ask what happened during the Civil War.
The Knowledge Graph is designed to answer those questions. Instead of searching for things individually, you’ll find out everything there is to know about whatever topic you choose. For example, if you searched for “dogs,” Google would show you all kinds of facts about dogs, including whether you could buy one online, where you could take a class on dog training, and even what breeds are popular today.
So far, at the time of this writing, Google’s knowledge graph includes around 570 million entities and 18 billion facts, covering topics ranging from sports teams to famous musicians to historical events.
Where Do Knowledge Graph Facts Come From?
Facts in the Knowledge Graph come primarily from three types of sources: public sources, licensed data, and suggestions from our editors. Public sources include things like Wikipedia articles, news sites, blogs, and government documents. Licensed data includes things like sports scores, stock prices and weather forecasts. And suggestions are submitted by people who claim a piece of content as theirs.
Google also receives factual information directly from content owners in various ways. For example, some publishers choose to submit their own fact files, while others request specific facts about their content. Some even ask us to change a particular Knowledge Panel based on what they believe is true about their subject.
How Does Google Correct or Remove Knowledge Graph Information?
Google processes billions of searches every day. They explain that they use machine learning to keep up with the massive volume of queries that they receive. Google says that their goal is to help people find what they are looking for quickly and easily. Google claims to do this by providing thorough, high-quality answers. Although, there are some people who disagree.
However, the scale of search means there is always room for improvement. To make sure that Google continues delivering great experiences, they explain that they focus on constantly refining their systems. One important aspect of refining their systems is making sure that they don’t inadvertently introduce errors into their products such as the knowledge graph.
To achieve this, they say, they rely heavily on their public reporting systems. These tools allow Google to identify issues and resolve them quickly before they affect users. For example, if someone provides incorrect information about themselves in one of Google’s public reports, Google might decide it doesn’t belong in our knowledge graph.
In addition to improving their systems overall, Google will also review the data collected through their public reporting systems to make sure that they are following their policies correctly. If Google notices something that looks like it could violate their policies, they say they will take action in order to fix it.
How to Request Changes to the Knowledge Panel Google Shows
Knowledge Panels allow businesses to present information about themselves and their products or services. They provide additional context for searches and help people find what they want faster.
If you’re the subject or an official spokesperson for an organization shown in a Knowledge Panel, you can claim it and suggest changes to the display. You can do this directly via the Knowledge Panel settings menu.
Beyond official entities, anyone can submit feedback to Google regarding any issues they might have with knowledge panels, Business Profiles, and Knowledge Graph information in general, to improve the quality of such information.
Such displays have feedback options. For example, when someone adds a review or comment about a business, the business owner receives a notification in Google Search Console. When someone sends feedback, the Knowledge Graph team at Google reviews it and makes improvements.
Google’s Policies for Their Knowledge Graph
Google has been working hard to make sure Knowledge Graph and similar displays are a useful and safe experience for everyone. They have created systems that work to prevent displaying items that violate their general policies, or their list of policies that affect these types of queries:
- Advertisements
- Dangerous content
- Deceptive practices
- Harassing content
- Hateful content
- Manipulated media
- Medical topics
- Regulated goods
- Sexually explicit content
- Terrorist content
- Violence & gore
- Vulgar language & profanity
All of the above are violations of Google’s policies when it comes to content that cannot be in the knowledge graph.
Google is constantly monitoring and making updates to these systems and policies. They also encourage users who find anything that is a violation of these policies to let them know.
Some Important Information on Disambiguation in the Knowledge Graph
Many knowledge graphs are in existence today. One of the most interesting ones is Google’s Knowledge Graph. This is a database of facts about people, places, organizations, things and events that are structured around entities such as celebrities, movies, books, sports teams, cities and countries.
The Knowledge Graph is very powerful because it allows you to find information about specific topics without having to type in keywords. For example, if someone searches for “Barack Obama,” the Knowledge Graph will return relevant articles, videos, images, etc., organized into categories based on his life story. You don’t even have to know what he looks like or where he lives; the system knows that Barack Obama is a person.
Google’s Knowledge Graph is often confused with Google’s Knowledge Panel. The Knowledge Panel is a tool that appears within the search box and provides quick access to some of the most popular queries that people make. The panel includes a list of suggested answers to questions such as “What is the capital of France?” and “How tall is Justin Bieber?” However, there is no connection between the Knowledge Graph and the Knowledge Panel. They are completely separate systems.
Indeed, any type of semi-structured data could be described as a knowledge graph, including encyclopedias or databases such as the IMDB (the Internet Movie Database).
In fact, Google has used data sets such as the CIA Factbook and Wikipedia in order to construct their own knowledge graph.
The Different Types of Entity Topics
Google has been gradually adding entity types over the years. These include things like people, places, organizations, events, products, brands, movies, books, TV shows, music artists, and so on. This information helps provide context for searches. For example, you could ask questions about a person based on the entity type, rather than just having the name. You could ask questions about a brand based on the entity type.
Any entity is attributed to being a particular topic type. This could include being an Event, an Organization, a Person, Place, or Country.
If a keyword phrase does not fall into any of the above types, then it could simply be a “Thing.” There is also the possibility that new entity types will be created by Google, in which that “Thing” could then finally be categorized and given a position in the knowledge graph.
However, Google continues to remain relatively weak at recognizing all entities. It is likely that around 20 percent (maybe more at the time of this writing) of entities are recognized in Google’s NLP algorithm.
Dixon Jones, who is the owner and CEO of Inlinks.net (a semantic optimization tool), explains quite a few benefits of utilizing the knowledge graph.
He dives into the following benefits which include, but are not limited to:
- Scaling of the data
- Diversity of sources and data
- Integrity of the information displayed
- Speed at which information is retrieved
The Google Knowledge Graph Implementation Has Some Benefits
The Knowledge Graph is one of Google’s most recent innovations. It organizes the web into topics, such as “People,” “Businesses,” and “Places.” This allows Google to deliver relevant information based on what you’re looking for, rather than just returning the best match for a keyword. For example, searching for “people” might bring up people like Barack Obama, while searching for “businesses” could return businesses like Starbucks and McDonald’s.
This type of organization makes sense because it leverages Google’s massive scale; the company now crawls over 8.9 million pages per day. But there are many ways to organize the web, and some work better than others. A search engine crawls the web and builds a database of every single webpage. While this works great for finding the exact text of a webpage, it doesn’t do much good for understanding the context around that text.
For example, imagine you want to find out how to make a cake. You enter the word “cake” into Google. Instead of seeing a list of recipes, you see a bunch of images and videos about cakes. Why did Google show those things? Because it crawled the web and found lots of pictures of cakes. And since each picture had different captions, Google used machine learning to understand what you wanted. In short, the Knowledge Graph uses natural language processing to understand what you mean when you say something like “make a cake.”
The Knowledge Graph Has Some Scaling Benefit
The current total number of webpages is hotly contested, and while some argue they are countless, it is certainly in the trillions and growing at a very fast rate every day. By comparison, the number of topics known to humankind is much smaller (maybe in the order of hundreds or thousands) and is growing at an even slower pace. This means that there is a tremendous amount of duplication of ideas in the information on the Web.
By storing the information about a concept in a semi-structural format, the world’s information needs take up a lot less space and have much fewer duplications. In fact, the World Wide Web alone contains enough data to store all the information ever produced by human civilization since the beginning of history.
But now, researchers say, we’re reaching a tipping point where the volume of information online overwhelms us. We’re drowning in data.
And that’s why some experts believe that the solution isn’t simply to throw up our hands and stop trying to organize everything. Instead, they think that the best approach is to start organizing things better. To build systems that make sense of the overwhelming amount of data and help us navigate it.
That’s the idea behind the scaling benefit of the knowledge graph. This allows for a truly scalable solution that helps organize all of the world’s data in a massive way, while also being able to provide meaning and understanding of that data for humans to benefit.
The Diversity of the Knowledge Graph’s Data Sources Is Also a Benefit
Diversity of sources refers to how many opportunities Google has to provide the most relevant information to users who might be searching for something.
For example, you could ask Google what the best place to buy groceries is in New York City. Or you might want to know how much it costs to rent a one bedroom apartment there. These are both questions that can be answered well with information from multiple sources. But if you just asked Google for the answer, it wouldn’t know where to look for that information. So, Google uses knowledge about topics to determine where to find the most relevant information.
Today, we know that different types of data sources complement each other. For example, while some people prefer reading news articles written by journalists, others like to read blogs or watch videos. And even though the number of articles about a topic is important, sometimes a few well-written articles can convey just as much information as dozens of low-quality ones.
This diversity of data sources helps Google because it gives the company more opportunities to show the most relevant information to the user. When a user searches for something specific, such as “best restaurants in New York,” Google can use information from many different places to provide the most accurate answer possible. If Google had just one source of information, it wouldn’t know whether the user wanted a review of a particular restaurant or a list of recommendations based on location. This data source diversity allows for Google to utilize a variety of dimensions that may be associated with a particular search, rather than just one dimension.
The Benefit of the Knowledge Graph’s Information Integrity
Google’s Knowledge Graph is a powerful tool that provides people with access to reliable facts about almost anything. However, there are many areas where the accuracy of the graph could use improvement. For example, the graph does not always provide accurate information about sports teams, celebrities, or politicians. This is because the team names, actor names, and politician names used in the graph are often inaccurate or incomplete.
Even though the filters help to improve the quality of the graph, they do not guarantee that the information is correct. For instance, sometimes incorrect information could be subject to manipulation by unscrupulous SEO professionals or other bad actors. At other times, the information is simply missing altogether. This makes it possible for people to manipulate the graph by adding false or misleading information.
Any new fact about a topic may actually have to pass some checks that are involved in Google’s systems before they are added to the knowledge graph. But, how they do this and internal processes for completing these checks are likely not to be talked about publicly.
There is a negative aspect to having a single point of truth for a source of information, however. The diversity of information is reduced and could be subject to manipulative bias, if the data sources themselves are compromised by bias. Sadly, there is likely not a simple solution for this particular issue.
The Benefits of the Knowledge Graph’s Speed of Information Retrieval
In a world where people are increasingly turning to online sources for information, there’s no doubt that speed matters. When we look for something specific, like what our favorite TV show is, we want to find it quickly. And when we’re trying to figure out how to do something, whether it’s cooking dinner, buying a car, or filing taxes, we don’t want to spend hours sifting through irrelevant information.
The good news is that finding relevant information is easier today than ever before. Thanks to advances in technology, we now have access to vast amounts of data about almost anything. But in order to make sense of that data, we need some way to organize it into categories. This is where topics come in.
When you ask Google a question, it pulls up the most relevant results based on your keywords. If you type “What is the best place to buy a car?,” you’ll see several different options including Amazon, CarMax, Edmunds, Kelley Blue Book, etc., because each site specializes in cars. As you scroll down the list, you’ll notice that many sites provide additional information, such as reviews, prices, specs, photos, videos, and more. These are all organized under the same category, called “cars.”
But imagine if you could go even further. Say you’re searching for a new sofa. You might start typing “sofa,” but you’d probably think twice before hitting enter. After all, you know that the phrase “best sofa” isn’t likely to produce useful results. So you might try “top 10 sofas.” Now you’ve narrowed things down, but it’s still too broad. Maybe you try “sofas for sale.” Or maybe you just give up and head over to IKEA.
Now let’s say you’re wondering what to cook for dinner tonight. You might type “cooking recipes” or “recipes for chicken.” But once again, you know that “how to cook” won’t lead to great results. Instead, you may try “quick and easy dinners.” If you’re feeling really ambitious, you might even try “easy family meals.”
This sort of categorization makes it much easier to find exactly what you’re looking for. In fact, it turns out that this approach works well for everything, from shopping to browsing social media. We use topics to help us navigate the Internet, and it turns out that topics work well for every aspect of life — especially when it comes to getting stuff done.
With Google’s knowledge graph, this is faster and more efficient than other forms of organization, leading to a user experience that’s better than what it would be otherwise.
Google’s Knowledge Graph Implementation is Here to Stay and Isn’t Going Away Anytime Soon
When it comes to optimizing your site for Google’s knowledge graph, it’s important to think about the topics and things that your site talks about. This can help you when it comes to producing and publishing content, and finding content opportunities.
By taking a deep-dive approach into specific topics as they are organized within Google’s knowledge graph, it’s possible to become an authoritative source on your topic.
Enough so that it helps increase your rankings and traffic exponentially (eventually).
By working to provide high quality content based on Google’s knowledge graph, you can optimize your site accordingly.
When do you plan on implementing modern optimization strategies that are in line with Google’s knowledge graph?
