Google Revamps Search With 'Knowledge Graph'

Google is rolling out a major new change to its search engine today—the Knowledge Graph. When a user searches for a famous person, place, or thing, a box will pop up on the side of the screen offering a concise list of relevant facts, reports ABC News. Google's database for the new tool includes 500 million people, places, and things combined with 3.5 billion items of information and connections.

You'll see info boxes for everything from movies to cities to roller coasters to planets to lighthouses, writes Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land. "Big change, but I don’t think it’ll be a shocking change to most Google users who will begin seeing it over the coming days on Google.com, if they’re searching in US English." Adds Liz Gannes at AllThingsD: "At least on an interface level, Microsoft is on a similar track with Bing—where it just launched custom panels for results in 150 categories. But what Google is doing goes quite a bit deeper." (More search engine stories.)