Early Roots of Google Knowledge Graph

Early 2012 I shared with you Google’s roll out of the Knowledge Graph, explaining how Google search was moving from word-based index to connecting people, places and things to deliver more intuitive results.

Marissa Mayer revealed basis for Knowledge Graph years ago.

In 2007 Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of Search Products & User Experience stated in an interview with IDGNS: “Google is really good with keywords, and that’s a limitation we think the search engine should be able to overcome with time. People should be able to ask questions, and we should understand their meaning, or they should be able to talk about things at a conceptual level.”

Enter Google Now

The conversation continued to explore how Google created the 1-800-GOOG-411 service to advance its efforts in speech recognition because they needed to create a “great speech-to-text model”, which is undoubtedly the driving force of “Google Now”, the virtual assistant inherent to Android Jelly Bean 4.1, perceived to rival iPhone’s Siri, and Samsung’s “S”, but with one distinct advantage, access to Google’s Knowledge Graph.

View Google Now Video:

Don’t forget Google’s ability to translate and index audio (speech) from video to meta content to include in search results (also mentioned by Mayer in the IDGNS interview).

We’ve witnessed the roll-out of services that seem arbitrary to some over the years. Google Glass, Self-driving cars, etc. It surely does seem to be coming together, but that is another post.

Google is very good at tantalizing the media to keep their story fresh. Now that Marissa Mayer has left Google to be CEO at Yahoo, many are anxious to hear from the Yahoo camp.

Could Yahoo give Google Knowledge Graph a run for the money?