Google Now’s Knowledge Graph improved, connections better explained by Google

One of the highlights of Jelly Bean is the Google Now feature, that voice-friendly personal assistant that can offer personalized search results and better help with certain day-to-day activities that rely more or less on performing the same online searches.
Google’s Knowledge Graph system is a complex algorithm that makes features like the ones available in Google Now possible. Whether used for mobile or desktop searches, the Knowledge Graph is a search feature that lets Google establish complex relationships between the things people search the web for and offer better-tailored results.
Thanks to the Knowledge Graph, Google can understand the actual meaning of some of our searches and provide more useful results, or at least that’s the purpose of it. Naturally, the better the search results, the more satisfied the customer is with Google, and ultimately the more money Google makes off of users via its ads.
If the Knowledge Graph feature sounds too complex, you’ll be happy to hear that Google plans to update it to make it even more useful and easier to understand. In fact, Google seems to want to be more transparent about its search results and it’s ready to explain how it knows what “people also search for,” when displaying search results boxes with the help of the Knowledge Graph:

Have you ever flipped through the “People also search for” section of the Knowledge Graph panels and wondered — just how are those two people connected anyway? […]
We’re starting by showing major co-starring roles between actors, movies, and TV shows as well as highlighting family connections amongst famous people in the Knowledge Graph. These connections won’t show up all the time, but when there is an interesting explanation available, you can now see it at a glance.

As this search feature gets improved in time, we should expect to see more such connections explanations to appear no matter what devices we use for online searches. At the same time let’s not forget that Google is investigated by several entities when it comes to its privacy policy and its search practices, so making search more transparent may help with those legal matters too, on the long run.

 

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