Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal and the Knowledge Graph

Abstract

Thus, when you type "10 Downing Street" into Google with Knowledge Graph, it responds to that phrase not as any old address but much in the way you or I might respond – with a string of real-world associations, prioritised in order of most frequently asked questions. In this way, as far back as 2002, Singhal introduced a refinement based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory on how the meaning of words is always influenced by context. Searches for ambiguous terms began to look beyond the search terms for other related words. So a phrase such as "hot dog" would be understood in relation to mustard and baseball games, not overheated canines. "Nuance," he says now, "is what makes us human." Again Knowledge Graph can deliver that; it starts to know what you want to know. But what about the less measurable ways that the ease of search has changed our lives? I ask. What about the ways in which it has diminished the excitement of serendipity, the way that it has made the personal experience of a chance encounter with knowledge so much rarer? Singhal has been working on that. The Knowledge Graph will still return the results it thinks you most likely need, but down the list it will have a randomised element; it will have chance built into it, another way it might mimic the way we think.