We’ve been talking plenty about Google‘s efforts in the search space lately, and today’s news holds another big announcement for us. Google has announced that its Knowledge Graph, which works behind-the-scenes with Google Now, has been expanded to include support for a handful of new languages. The Knowledge Graph is a way for Google to deliver not only the information you’re looking for when you search, but also extra information that’s relevant to your query.
Starting today, users can take advantage of Google’s Knowledge Graph in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese. The big G doesn’t go into much depth when explaining this new functionality in its post to the Inside Search blog, but it does give a few examples. For instance, Google talks of searching for a sumo wrestler in Japanese, which would not only give you his own ranks, but information on other top-ranked sumo wrestlers. All of that information would be given to you in Japanese, so you’d be able to discover all new information in your native language.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is worthy of being called “awesome.” However, Google says that this is more than just a simple translation job, as there are words that have different definitions all around the world to take into account. Knowledge Graph also considers what information is relevant to your region, so there’s a lot of work going on under the hood to make sure you get the best results possible.
According to Google, Knowledge Graph “now covers 570 million entities, 18 billion facts and connections, and about three times as many queries globally as when we first launched it.” That isn’t bad at all considering Knowledge Graph has only been around since May. Just a word of warning: Google says it will be rolling out this new functionality over the next few days, so if you don’t see it right this minute, just know that it’s on the way. Be sure to check out our story timeline below for more on Google Now!
