So Google’s trying to change things, again. For those of you who decide that this is the last straw and that you’re going Bing, farewell and good luck finding anything. For those of you wanting to find out what exactly Knowledge Graph is and why it isn’t as terrible as G+, click on through.

What Knowledge Graph does is supplement search results with information and links that some arcane algorithms have decided might be of interest to you in your search – so if you search “Michael Fassbender,” you’ll get the usual IMDB page, Wikipedia page and recent press releases, but Knowledge Graph will also through up a sidebar containing biographical information, historical data, related links, and images, collated by Google.

So you might not need to go to IMDB or Wikipedia.

The chief difference here is that, where before you’d be looking for the search terms “michael“+”fassbender,” and hoping that there aren’t many websites that feature, I don’t know, Michael Keaton and Rodney Fassbender – which would meet the requirements of your search without getting you what you want – Knowledge Graph sort of knows who Michael Fassbender is.

Or at least, there would a bunch of links and images discretely linked to the identity tag “Michael Fassbender,” or “Wimbledon,” or “the battle of Waterloo,” which would seperate them from other similar, but unrelated identities.

Says Emily Moxley, Product Manager at Google:

Google can jumpstart your research process by combining the information that others found useful with the information in the Knowledge Graph.

Notice too how they’re shifting from giving web users information and geared towards giving users knowledge.

Knowledge Graph is getting rolled out to English-reading users in the USA at present, looking at global rollouts in the next week or two.

[Source: Googleblog]