Google rolling out Knowledge Graph to English speakers worldwide

Google has announced that it is pushing out some significant updates to the Knowledge Graph platform this week.

The most notable change would be accessibility. Starting on Thursday, Knowledge Graph will be available anyone searching in English worldwide. Previously, it was only available in the United States.

Furthermore, Knowledge Graph results are going to be localized for different regions. This would be relevant and speed up the search process when looking for information about commonly named towns and sports teams.

Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search, cited a few examples in a blog post:

If you’re in Australia and search for [chiefs], you’ll get the rugby team—its players, results and history.

We’ll also use this intelligence to help you find the right result more quickly when your search may have different meanings. For example, if you search for [rio], you might be interested in the Brazilian city, the recent animated movie or the casino in Vegas.

The second major update is that Knowledge Graph results will be added to the auto-complete library of search terms for the search box, improving Google's search functionality overall.

And if you really want to get completely intertwined in the Google ecosystem, the Internet giant is also introducing a limited trial in which you can sign up to get information from your Gmail account right from the regular search box.

This has the potential to be a little worrisome to some users given the aforementioned update of saving Knowledge Graph search terms for the auto-complete system -- especially if the info drawn from their accounts is sensitive. But then again, this is a limited trial and surely there are kinks to be worked out first.

Knowledge Graph was introduced earlier this year as "a critical first step towards building the next generation of search."

At launch time in May, the Knowledge Graph contained over 500 million objects and more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects, honing in on what people search for and what we discover from those results.

In a nutshell, it offers much more detailed information and relevant topics to a user when using the search engine. This data appears on the right side of the Google search results page, and it has already drawn comparisons to Wikipedia and Facebook's Social Graph.

For a closer look at the technology under the hood of Knowledge Graph, check out the promo video below:

Image via The Official Google Blog