CNN) -- So, let's say you're doing a Google search
for "Kings." Did you mean the L.A. hockey team or the Sacramento
basketball team? Maybe the TV show? Or maybe you actually wanted to know
something about monarchs.
Google on Wednesday
announced Knowledge Graph,
a significant change to how search results are delivered that the
company believes will make their search engine think more like a human.
"The web pages we
[currently] return for the search 'kings,' they're all good," Jack
Menzel, director of product management at Google, told CNN in an
interview. "You, as a human, associate those words with their real-world
meaning but, for a computer, they're just a random string of
characters."
With Knowledge Graph,
which will begin rolling out to some users immediately, results will be
arranged according to categories with which the search term has been
associated. So, in the above example, boxes will appear with separate
results for the hockey team, basketball team and TV show.
The user can then click on one of those boxes to only get results for the specific topic they were searching.
"It hones your search results right in on the task that you're after," Menzel said.
More specific searches,
say for the name of a celebrity, will render boxes with basic
information, as well as links to what Google believes are possibly
related searches.
Menzel says the initial
version of Knowledge Graph has information on 500 million people, places
and things and uses 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections to
create categories for them.
The feature will begin
rolling out as early as Wednesday afternoon for some users in the United
States and eventually be available on desktop, mobile and tablet
searches. It will first become available in English, then in other
languages, Menzel said.
