Google Launches Knowledge Graph Today

By: RH

Google launched its Knowledge Graph today. The knowledge graph works to provide info on certain topics that provide answes if you will.

If you were to do a search on Bill Gates for example there would be info appearing on the right hand of the search page with facts and figures and other various info.

Not every topic will have initiate the knowlege graph. The product is just launching today and I have done some searches that have showed nothing on the right side.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land did a very extensive review of the product and its worth reading.

Read it here.

When I was reading about the product one of the things I thought about was traffic to publishers.

Sullivan covers that in his article. Taken from the article:

Will Publisher Traffic Drop?

Search engines have increasingly moved toward showing direct answers in their results over the years. Such efforts have worried some publishers, leaving them wondering if they’ll be left out of receiving search traffic. After all, if search engines provide answers right within their results, why would anyone click away?

Google’s Knowledge Graph is going to massively increase the number of direct answers shown, which will almost certainly renew concerns.

Singhal’s response is that publishers shouldn’t worry. He said that most of these types of queries, Google has found, don’t take traffic away from most sites. Part of this seems to be that the boxes encourage more searching, which in turn still eventually takes people to external sites.

Still, some are going to lose out, he admits. But he sees that as something that was going to happen inevitably, anyway, using a “2+2″ metaphor. If people are searching for 2+2, why shouldn’t Google give a direct answer to that versus sending searchers to a site? By the way, Google does do math like this already and has for years.

Head of Google Search, Amit Singhal actually addressed this yesterday at SMX London. You can watch the video of him below.