Your Google search experience is about to change. No, don’t worry, it’s not another social integration. The latest update has nothing to do with Facebook and everything to do with Google’s core strengths of organizing information so that you can find it faster. Now, when you search certain things, say, Tom Cruise, a box will pop up in the right column of your search with structured data about the topic. Google can identify 500 million people, places, and things and can serve up a custom selection of data based on the nature of the noun. Google knows that you are very likely to want to know certain things about Tom Cruise (e.g. his height) and other things about Bill Gates (his net worth) and other things about astronaut Don Pettit (which Shuttle missions he flew). How good is Google at both guessing what you want to know and having that information in its databases? In some cases, the company is really good. “Based on the other things that people are looking for when they are looking for Tom Cruise, our knowledge graph is going to show you 39 percent of the answers to the next thing you might be looking for,” said Johanna Wright, director of product management for The Google Knowledge Graph, which is what the company is calling this new feature.
