Google adds new feature to search engine

Silicon Valley based Google, on Wednesday has made changes in its search engine by adding a new feature 'The Knowledge Graph' that enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about -- landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more -- and instantly get information that's relevant to your query.

"Right now this is for US English (Google.com). It's not localised to other regions," Google press spokesperson told rediff.com, adding that at present there is no timeline to announce on international availability.

It will require more work since the Knowledge Graph needs to be localised, which as you can imagine is a challenging problem.

About the accuracy of the information that is available on the Knowledge Graph, the spokesperson said, "It's worth noting that we provide users a feedback link so we can improve our data, and we're always striving for more accuracy."

So a Knowledge Graph is somewhat regionally specific.

This is a critical first step towards building

the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do said Google to stay as the perfect search engine.

Google's Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.

It's also augmented at a much larger scale. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects.

And it's tuned based on what people search for, and what it finds out on the web.

Language can be ambiguous -- do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician?

Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean -- just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results.

"With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you're likely to need for that particular thing," wrote Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering wrote on Google blog.

The Knowledge Graph to US English users is also going to be available on smartphones and tablets.