When Google first announced the Knowlege Graph, it named Freebase as one of its primary sources of structured data. It was named as one several public sources of information, which also included Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook.
Google announced that it will be closing Freebase, and moving toward the Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikidata, which is described as “a free linked database that can be read and edited by both humans and machines”. It acts as “central storage” for the structured data of Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikisource, and others.
WIkidata has simply been improving better than Freebase, so Google has decided to support that instead, and will be working to transition Freebase data over to Wikidata appropriately.
“When we publicly launched Freebase back in 2007, we thought of it as a ‘Wikipedia for structured data,’ So it shouldn’t be surprising that we’ve been closely watching the Wikimedia Foundation’s project Wikidata] since it launched about two years ago,” Google’s Freebase says in a Google+ update (via Search Engine Roundtable). “We believe strongly in a robust community-driven effort to collect and curate structured knowledge about the world, but we now think we can serve that goal best by supporting Wikidata — they’re growing fast, have an active community, and are better-suited to lead an open collaborative knowledge base.”
We should note that while Freebase has been around since 2007, it’s only belonged to Google since the company acquired Metaweb in 2010.
Google is helping transfer Freebase to Wikidata, and in the middle of next year, it will wind down the Freebase service as a standalone project. They’ll also launch a new API for entity search powered by Google’s Knowledge Graph.
“Loading Freebase into Wikidata as-is wouldn’t meet the Wikidata community’s guidelines for citation and sourcing of facts — while a significant portion of the facts in Freebase came from Wikipedia itself, those facts were attributed to Wikipedia and not the actual original non-Wikipedia sources,” Freebase explains. “So we’ll be launching a tool for Wikidata community members to match Freebase assertions to potential citations from either Google Search or our Knowledge Vault, so these individual facts can then be properly loaded to Wikidata.”
It’s a system of Google’s, which stores information so that machines and people can read it. It’s basically Google’s giant database of facts. When you ask Google questions and get those direct answers, they’re likely coming from there. Rather than relying on crowdsourcing info like the Knowledge Graph, it uses an algorithm to pull info from the web, and turn it into raw data. You can get more in depth into it here.
“We believe this is the best first step we can take toward becoming a constructive participant in the Wikidata community, but we’ll look to continually evolve our role to support the goal of a comprehensive open database of common knowledge that anyone can use,” Freebase says.
Before the end of March, Google will launch a Wikidata import review tool and announce a transition plan for the Freebase Search API & Suggest Widget to a Knowledge Graph-based solution.
On March 31, Freebase will become read-only, the website will no longer accept edits, and they’ll retire the MQL write API.
On June 30, they’ll retire the Freebase website and APIs.
Google has formally announced the “Knowledge Graph,” its way of providing results about “things”. We’ve reported on the products of this a couple of times, as Google has been testing them.
An example would be when you search for a band, and Google puts some boxes on the side of the search results page with some specific info about that band. Likewise for movies, actors, books and people. According to the company, it also includes landmarks, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, celestial objects, works of art, and more.
The main theme of the Knowledge Graph, as Google is presenting it, is that it is making Google smarter and better at giving you answers. Better at distinguishing what you mean by certain queries, which may come with more than one meaning. Googles gives the example of Taj Mahal: “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.”
Google put out the following video talking about it:
This appears to be the big Google change that was discussed in a popular Wall Street Journal article in March, which we wrote about here. In our take, we talked about how Google is doing more to keep people from having to leave its own pages, by providing more info on them – basically, users have less reasons to click through to other sites. It’s wroth noting, however, that Google SVP, Engineering, Amit Singhal, indicated at SMX London this week, that Google’s Search Plus Your World personalized results are generating greater clickthrough rates for search results.
According to the WSJ article, Google’s 2010 acquisition of Metaweb plays a significant role in what is now known as the Knowledge Graph.
Metaweb came with a big open database of 12 million things (including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more) called Freebase. There’s more to it than that though.
“Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook,” says Singhal. “It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. 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 we find out on the web.”
“How do we know which facts are most likely to be needed for each item? For that, we go back to our users and study in aggregate what they’ve been asking Google about each item,” explains Singhal. “For example, people are interested in knowing what books Charles Dickens wrote, whereas they’re less interested in what books Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, and more in what buildings he designed.”
The Knowledge Graph is “gradually” rolling out to U.S. users in English.
Google has been testing/experimenting with some richer search results pages for things like movies, actors, bands, books, people, etc. We wrote about it last month when a reddit user posted a screen cap, but from the sound of it, these results may become commonplace for all Google users in the near term.
Basically, based on the description from the Wall Street Journal, Google would be providing more direct answer-type results that would keep more users from having to click through links to actually find what they’re looking for. This would fit that bill.
“With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better,” Google upon the acquisition. “Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers.”
If these features do indeed become actual features, beyond experiments, it will further illustrate the fact that Google’s results pages are becoming much more cluttered, particularly when compared to Bing’s more simplistic refresh. It’s a far cry from the simple SERPs Google users got to know and love a decade or so ago, though there has been a lot of functionality added.
Are we getting ready to see a massive overhaul of Google or just some expansion of what we’ve already seen for years. That’s the question. Either way, it appears Google wants to keep users more on its own sites and less on other people’s sites.
If Google can give users what they need without sending them to other sites, that makes the user experience better doesn’t it? On the other hand, it could hurt a lot of other sites and businesses in the process, depending on how certain things play out. Do you think Google should do more to keep users from having to click through to third-party websites? Let us know what you think in the comments.
What Is Google Planning?
The Wall Street Journal put out this huge article about changes brewing with Google (specifically, the company’s search engine) that would make you think search as you know it is about to be turned on its head. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land provides some good analysis and what he calls a “reality check”.
The truth about it all is that much of what the WSJ article discusses has been part of Google for a while. However, that does not mean that there is not a bigger picture takeaway we should get out of that article – the direction Google is moving in, which does have large implications for sites (and therefore businesses), competition in search and social media, and advertising. It also sounds like Google is getting more aggressive in the strategy.
Okay, so what is the strategy? Basically, it’s about providing more direct answers in search results. Much of what the article discusses sounds like what Google has been doing with Google Squared, as Danny mentions.
With efforts like rich snippets and the search answers feature, we’re just beginning to apply our understanding of the web to make search better. Type [barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. We can offer this kind of experience because we understand facts about real people and real events out in the world. But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers.
In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.
According to the WSJ, that 12 million is now more like 200 million entities, and Google is also trying to get access to more organizations’ and government agencies’ databases to expand even more.
Will Google’s Broader Strategy Hurt Your Site’s Traffic?
The Journal calls the forthcoming changes (reportedly in the coming months) “among the biggest in the company’s history” adding that they “could affect millions of websites”. The report cites “one person briefed on Google’s plans” as saying the changes could directly impact 10% to 20% of all search queries or “tens of billions per month”.
That’s a lot.
Of course, anytime Google makes big changes, webmasters and SEOs have to pay attention, and often adjust their strategies. Sometimes the changes have a huge impact on the web and businesses. See Panda update.
Interestingly, the Journal’s report says “people briefed on the matter” indicate that Google is hoping the changes will make people stay longer on its own site. Obviously, time spent on Google’s search results page is time not being spent on your site. If Google’s expansion of these direct answers is as huge as it’s being portrayed (and probably depending on the partnerships the company is able to secure), this could cover a pretty broad range of website and content types. We might have a lot more types of sites joining the growing list of “competitors” complaining about Google “favoring its own results”.
It’s definitely worth noting, however, that the article also implies Google will be offering markup solutions for sites to use to highlight certain content elements to be displayed in the direct answer-style results. Even still, applying such markup, would presumably only help Google in keeping users on Google’s site and not going to yours. Depending on what you are hoping to achieve with your site’s traffic, this could be either critical or make no difference. A brick and mortar store would already have to deal with a similar situation, by having info displayed in Google Places. If the end goal is simply trying to get customers in the door, who cares if they’re actually going to your site? Other businesses rely on traffic to their sites.
We’re No Longer In The Stone Age Of Search
Given recent developments in the ever-lasting discussion and efforts related to aggregation (such as new legislation proposed in Germany), there is another interesting layer to this whole strategy. Some sites may simply have a problem with Google displaying content from their sites. Clearly, some (news organizations in particular) already don’t like that Google displays snippets of content when linking to sources. Depending on how big this direct answers strategy gets, I can see more fuss being raised in that area. At least with the traditional snippet-based result, it’s accompanied by a link that is likely to drive a referral to the content.
This appears to be the way search is evolving though, and it’s not just Google. Bing has touted its ability to serve direct answers since it launched. That’s why it’s “the decision engine”. Then you things like Wolfram Alpha, which is heavily integrated with the ever-popular Siri. Despite its mysterious absence from the new iPad, I think we can still expect that to be more involved in the future of search. Google has its own competitor to that in the works, by the way. I wonder how much these changes will play into that.
Competition and Advertising
Though Google has been doing a lot of the direct answer and semantic search stuff for years, I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that since Microsoft launched Bing, Google has made some changes directly in response to what Bing has done.
As far as competition goes, it’s not all about Microsoft and Bing though – even in search. It’s clear that Facebook and Google are major rivals these days (as companies), and as I’ve written about several times in the past, Facebook has some real opportunities to make a bigger play in search. I’m not going to rehash all of that again here, but ultimately it’s about where web users are spending their time and monetizing those web users – mostly through advertising.
The fact is that a lot of Google users aren’t thrilled with all the Google+ integration that has been happening – namely “Search Plus Your World,” which injects a personalized, largely Google+ based experience (despite the on/off toggle). We’ve seen plenty of examples of where relevancy has been sacrificed. It will be interesting to see if an expanded amount of direct answers can help counter that. Interestingly enough both strategies serve to keep users on Google properties more – whether that be reading a direct answer from a results page or clicking through to a Google+ profile. And while Google+ doesn’t have ads on it now, how long do you think that will last? After all, what people commonly think of as Google+ is really just Google’s version fo the News Feed. It’s just a feature. Google+ is a social layer across the greater Google.
Remember the whole Gizmodo-iPhone-leak controversy? Today, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Mateo County D.A. has withdrawn the warrant obtained to search the house of Gizmodo’s Jason Chen.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Gizmodo reached an agreement with the authorites to give the D.A. materials deemed "relevant to the case" and Gizmodo’s other equipment will be returned.
Apple dominated much of the tech industry’s attention today with a press conference in which CEO Steve Jobs addressed the iPhone 4’s antenna issues that have been covered heavily in the press since the device’s launch.
Apple ended up announcing that it will give away free cases to iPhone 4 owners, and will give refunds to those who already purhchased them. That is unless they purchased third-party cases.
Google announced its acquisition of Metaweb, which maintains an open database of "things". This will make search results smarter. That’s the goal anyway. Think of it as an extension of Google’s rich snippets and search answers. Doug has more on it here.
Bloomberg reports that Dell has proposed a settlement to SEC staff related to allegations about its relationship with Intel. Dell has been under investigation for five years for Intel-related accounting issues.
Skype’s iPhone application has apparently gone missing from the App Store, and not even Skype knows why at this point. (Via TechCrunch).
A while back, Google announced that it would no longer be selling the Nexus One phone through its own store. According to Phandroid, the company has now received its final shipment of the device.
Two days ago, Marissa Mayer published an article in which she mentioned the wide range of meanings a simple search term like "jaguar" can have. Now, Google’s taken a big step towards improving its grasp of language, with the company announcing this afternoon that it’s acquired Metaweb.
Let’s address two points right now. First, Google did not disclose the purchase price. Second, we have no idea why news of this acquisition was sandwiched between Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference and the start of the weekend, when it seems unlikely to get a lot of coverage.
Otherwise, Jack Menzel, a director of product management at Google, explained on the Official Google Blog that Metaweb is "a company that maintains an open database of things in the world." He then added, "Working together we want to improve search and make the web richer and more meaningful for everyone."
Need an example? Menzel continued, "Type [Barack obama birthday] in the search box and see the answer right at the top of the page. Or search for [events in San Jose] and see a list of specific events and dates. . . . But what about [colleges on the west coast with tuition under $30,000] or [actors over 40 who have won at least one oscar]? These are hard questions, and we’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers."
Indeed, Metaweb’s Freebase, which is a "database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more" should come in quite handy there. And interestingly, Google intends to keep Freebase free and open (as it is now) so that other companies can use it.
It should be exciting to see what happens. Natural language search has of course represented something of a holy grail for search companies for quite some time.
Let’s address two points right now. First, Google did not disclose the purchase price. Second, we have no idea why news of this acquisition was sandwiched between Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference and the start of the weekend, when it seems unlikely to get a lot of coverage.