Even as Microsoft  is trying to become ‘more social’ with Bing by opting for integration with all your Facebook friends, you cannot expect Google to remain behind in this quest to ‘socialize’. Its search engine is getting sharper and smarter. The company has just introduced a dynamic new feature known as ‘Knowledge Graph’.

Relevancy holds the key

Over the last few years, the search engine giant has been trying to reconcile data, collated and curated from its own virtual as well as real-world resources plus from all other available sources on the Web. It is attempting to create a database of not less than 500 million people, places and objects and of roughly 3.5 billion that will define relationships connecting or governing them.

So, for instance, if you happen to key in ‘kings’, you will receive links to search results for the LA hockey team, the 2009 NBC TV series and the Sacramento basketball team. One you choose the right option, you launch the webpage with all the relevant results. For celebrities, the box present on the right rail will incorporate key facts and photos, apart from links to all of the related searches, for serendipitous and dynamic encounters as you will dig deeper into the rabbit hole of links. If you are searching for a renowned artist, the search is expected to return not just specifics about that painter, but also for others obviously from the same influence, thought and school.

The search tool rolled out a couple of days ago, will work this way:

• When a user types in a particular key term on the search site of Google, in addition to the relevant search results, he or she will get, there will also be a box just on the right.
• It offers several possible topic results that are related so as to drill down to what one means.
• To put it in other words, the focus on part of Google is things, not strings.

An official blog post on the Google site elaborates:

“Search is a lot about discovery; the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But it still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.  Take a query like Taj Mahal. The search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine these have been just two words. But we all know it has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant.”

Keeping this in mind, the researchers have been working on a new intelligent model, a ‘graph’ that will understand real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. The idea is to hone the user searches and offer them more focus, breadth, depth and detail.