Knowledge Graph? “Graph” is a technical term used to describe how a set of objects are connected. Google has used a “link graph” to model how pages link to each other, in order to help determine which are popular and relevant for particular searches. Facebook has used a “social graph” understand how people are connected. “Knowledge Graph” is Google’s term for how it is building relationships between different people, places and things and report facts about these entities.

Big Change, Subtle Appearance

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal wrote about the coming change. At the time, I felt what was described seemed more an extension of things Google had already been doing rather than a dramatic shift. Now having seen it first-hand, I stand corrected. The WSJ had it right. This is indeed a big change in line with other major launches like Search Plus Your World last January and Universal Search in 2007.

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.

Google will still look largely the same as it does now. Knowledge Graph information flows into new units — they have no official name (and I did ask), so I’ll call them “knowledge panels.” These panels appear to the right of Google’s regular results, rather than disrupt those familiar links:

Knowledge panels don’t always appear, only showing up only when Google deems them relevant. But when Google does think they’re relevant, they’re a pretty cool search exploration tool. When the head of Google Search, Amit Singhal, let me play with the new system following his keynote talk at our SMX London show yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of it like a form of StumbleUpon or channel surfing for search.

Fact Surfing

A search for Star Trek brought up a panel that included a reference to Star Trek: Voyager, my favorite of all the series. Jumping to explore that, the Voyager box included a reference to Babylon 5, another favorite sci-fi show of mine. Jumping to that box, there was a reference to Claudia Christian, who wonderfully played one of the main characters in Babylon 5, Susan Ivanova. I surfed over for a look.

If you’ve ever started reading a Wikipedia page and then gotten lost jumping from one topic to another, that’s the experience I think many are about to discover with Google. You’ll not only discover answers to factual questions, but you’ll likely quickly explore more than you had planned and have fun doing it.

3.5 Billion Facts About 500 Million Objects

Google says it has compiled over 3.5 billion facts, which include information about and relationships between 500 million objects or “entities,” as it sometimes calls them. In general, entities are persons, places and things. You know, nouns.

In particular, these are just some of the categories of objects Google has facts about:

• Actors, Directors, Movies
• Art Works & Museums
• Cities & Countries
• Islands, Lakes, Lighthouses
• Music Albums & Music Groups
• Planets & Spacecraft
• Roller Coasters & Skyscrapers
• Sports Teams

Again, those are just some of the categories. The relationships are also as important as the facts. The relationships allow the Knowledge Graph to know which actors to list for a particular movie or which spacecraft have visited  a planet.

The Most Popular Facts

How do you keep from getting overwhelmed with useless facts? Google picks out the facts for each object that are most sought in relation to that object.

“We are showing all the things that people look for in a given query,” Singhal told me.

Consider these two knowledge panels, one for Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, the other for architect Frank Lloyd Wright (you can click to enlarge):

For both, you’re told when they were born and where they were educated. After that, the remaining facts shown differ.

Only Groening has facts about his parents and siblings listed. Why? Look closely at the names: Margaret (Marge), Homer, Lisa. Groening named characters after his own family. Looking at searches related to Groening, Google can tell these are commonly sought answers.

For Groening, the books he’s authored are listed. For Wright, his famous buildings are. That makes sense. People are far more interested in structures by Wright than by books by him. Indeed, Google’s autocomplete suggestions — which are based on the most popular terms related to a core search topic — reflect this:

I found it fascinating to see what was shown, as I ran through various classes of searches. For Disneyland, popular rides were shown. For a ride like Space Mountain, the duration was shown (really, only 3 minutes?). For an astronaut, I was shown the missions and overall time they’d spent in space (how cool to have that as a fact about yourself). For Buckingham Palace, the size of floor space was listed. For Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, their estimated net worth was shown.

Each knowledge panel has a “People also search for” area at the bottom which lists related people, places or things. Again, the relationships are determined by looking at search data. People who search for Groening, for example, often search for David X. Cohen, who co-created Futurama with Groening.

For search marketers, or anyone interested in how people search, these panels have become another great discovery resource along with keyword research tools like Google Trends, Google Insights, Google Correlate or the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Facts But Not Actions

One thing I found lacking was that the knowledge panels I saw often lacked links to let people take actions related to these objects. For example, one of the popular things people want in relation to Buckingham Palace is to book tickets for tours. However, the panel had no options for this.

In contrast, the new “Snapshots” announced (but still about a week from going live) as part of Bing’s relaunch last week are heavy on trying to help people do things like book tickets or reservations.

Why not have actions?

“We will, of course, explore that, but right now, we just want to take it out and see how it works,” Singhal said.

Occasionally you can take actions via the links to some of the source providers of facts, as with some music searches that might credit Songkick or StubHub.

Which Andromeda Did You Mean?

For some searches, there may be more than one entity that Google has facts for related to a search. In these cases, rather than make the wrong guess, Google will put up a “See results box” as shown below for Andromeda:

Andromeda could mean, in Google’s Knowledge Graph, the galaxy, the TV show or the Swedish band. This box, also known as a disambiguation box, allows people to make the right choice.

Where Do The Facts Come From?

How does Google know any of these facts? Google Squared was an initial attempt in 2009 to extract facts from the web. Google still has that technology, but the service was never that impressive on accuracy and closed as standalone site last year.

Rather, it was Google’s purchase of Metaweb in 2010 that really jump-started the Knowledge Graph. Metaweb was building both the relationships and, though Freebase, a database of facts.

Since that time, Singhal said Google’s massively grown the fact database. Contributions happen with Freebase, but data also comes from publicly-available sources like Wikipedia and The CIA World Factbook and even information out of Google Books. Beyond that, Google also licenses data from others.

“Wherever we can get our hands on structured data, we add it,” Singhal said.

Fixing Bad Data

Drawing from Wikipedia and other public sources means that there’s no guarantee that the facts are accurate. That’s why the knowledge panels on Google all have a “Report a problem” link at the bottom.

If you click on that, you can then indicate if any particular fact is incorrect. Singhal said that Google will use a combination of computer algorithms and human review to decide if a particular fact should be corrected

If Google makes a change, the source provider is told. This mean, in particular, Wikipedia will be informed of any errors. It doesn’t have to change anything, but apparently the service is looking forward to the feedback.

“They really are excited about it. They get to get feedback from a much bigger group of people,” Singhal said.

Will Publisher Traffic Drop?

Search engines have increasingly moved toward showing direct answers in their results over the years. Such efforts have worried some publishers, leaving them wondering if they’ll be left out of receiving search traffic. After all, if search engines provide answers right within their results, why would anyone click away?

Google’s Knowledge Graph is going to massively increase the number of direct answers shown, which will almost certainly renew concerns.

Singhal’s response is that publishers shouldn’t worry. He said that most of these types of queries, Google has found, don’t take traffic away from most sites. Part of this seems to be that the boxes encourage more searching, which in turn still eventually takes people to external sites.

Still, some are going to lose out, he admits. But he sees that as something that was going to happen inevitably, anyway, using a “2+2″ metaphor. If people are searching for 2+2, why shouldn’t Google give a direct answer to that versus sending searchers to a site? By the way, Google does do math like this already and has for years.

Below, you can hear Singhal talk more about this when asked by a member of the audience at SMX London yesterday:

Click here to view the embedded video.

My concern is what happens if publishers have compiled great information that someone at Wikipedia or Freebase harvests into a database. For example, if a Disneyland fan site has organized a list of ride durations by doing original legwork, what credit do they get if that data is used? Facts can’t be trademarked, at least in the US, so anyone can help themselves assuming they don’t duplicate the exact format or presentation.

Google does list credit links to places like Wikipedia. In turn, Wikipedia does give credit (albeit in a way that doesn’t help search rankings) to the sources it draws from. But that puts actual source material two clicks away from the searcher, assuming the searcher wants to go beyond the fact they already received.

This is one that has to be watched closely. As I wrote before, it seems likely the Knowledge Graph will impact a relatively small set of sites that focus on facts, sites that already likely exposing answers in their listing descriptions and so not getting traffic anyway. But we’ll see.

It’s also important to remember that the “main” results aren’t disappearing. Consider again the Frank Lloyd Wright search, this time with the knowledge panel in context with the regular results:

As you can see, links to sites outside of Google remain to the left and in the most viewed area of a search results page.

Being Included

What if you want to be part of the new knowledge panels and Knowledge Graph in general? Singhal said that at the moment, there’s no mechanism designed for sites to do this. IE, if you run a site about Frank Lloyd Wright, there’s no way to be associated as some type of suggested source for the Frank Lloyd Wright panel.

Potentially, you could head over Freebase, open an account and contribute. Of course, I’m pretty sure adding your blog to a horrible list of blogs like this isn’t going to help. Maybe other categories might be more successful, but I’d hold off, for the moment.

Tagging parts of your pages with commonly used schema might be helpful, though I wouldn’t do this solely in hopes of getting your facts into the Knowledge Graph. The articles below have more about using schema:

• Schema.org: Google, Bing & Yahoo Unite To Make Search Listings Richer Through Structured Data
• Google Takes First Big Bite Into Rich Snippet Search With Recipes
• A New Google Rich Snippet For Real Estate, Other Business Listings
• Google Adds Rich Snippets For Application Reviews: iTunes Apps, Android & More
• Google Adds Rich Snippet Support For Music
• How Retailers Can Improve Product Visibility Using Structured Markup
• Concert Rich Snippets: List Your Ticket Sale Site Under Band Web Sites
• MicroData & Retail Products: Not Ready For Primetime?
• How To Use Rich Snippets, Structured Markup For High Powered SEO

Ads, Mobile & Tablet Formats

Anyone familiar with Google’s ads will immediately wonder what happens when the panel shows.

Singhal said that if there are also ads along with a knowledge panel for any search, the ads will still display. Google also has different formats for when a query has a few, many or no ads. I haven’t seen these, but I’ll try to update as they become visible after the launch.

In addition, Google also uses special formats to make the panels work well on tablet and mobile devices, he said. They aren’t restricted to just desktop search, so that’s good news for those of you who want an easier time to cheat at pub and bar quiz nights.

Sadly, there’s no way to just search the Knowledge Graph directly. It only appears with regular Google Search.

The Competition

Google’s not alone in having a knowledge graph, of course. Wolfram Alpha, launched in 2009, has continued to refine its service. It got a big boost being picked as a search partner by Apple to help power Siri (even though that recently embarrassed Apple on a particular search about smart phones).

As for Bing, it has a partnership with Wolfram Alpha plus owns Powerset technology that, somewhat similar to the Knowledge Graph, tries to deeply understand the meanings of words, rather than just really match patterns of letters.

But Bing hasn’t really seemed to capitalize on either its Wolfram partnership nor Powerset. Really, the Knowledge Graph seems to be going more head-to-head with Wolfram Alpha. Does it?

“Wolfram is far more computational,” Singhal said, explaining that Wolfram Alpha’s goal seems to be finding ways that you can effectively use facts in computations.

For example, you can enter cars in california / california population into Wolfram Alpha to have it take those two facts and come up with an average (about 1 car for every two people, by the way, using 2009 data).

Google’s not trying to perform these types of calculations. The focus is instead on providing popular facts.

The Future

The big picture, of course, is that some day the Knowledge Graph won’t just be used for facts. Instead, if Google can better tag actual web pages to entities, then it can better understand what those pages are about and related to, which might increase the relevancy of its regular results.

That’s down the line, as are many other changes to the knowledge panel themselves. Today represents only a start.

“This is just a baby step, in my view, to expose this to our users,” Singhal said.

To learn more about the Google Knowledge Graph, see coverage from others across the web organized here on Techmeme, the official Google blog post, plus the official video, below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related Articles

• Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
• Powerset Launches “Understanding Engine” For Wikipedia Content
• Wolfram Alpha Live Review: The Un-Google
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts
• Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets
• How Google Instant’s Autocomplete Suggestions Work
• WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!
• Google Testing “Sources” Area With Info About Movies, Books, People, Music & More
• Bing Relaunches, Features New Social Sidebar

I have confirmed the Bing 411 service is closing by calling the service and hearing immediately the message:

Bing 411: On June 1st, we are discontinuing the Bing 411 service.

There were reports of this via LiveSide where they said they “received a tip” on this news. But this is indeed happening and Bing is closing down their 411 service.

Google shut down their GOOG-411 service back in 2010. Bing kept theirs live hoping to fill that void, but clearly with the rise of smartphones and voice search embedded on those devices, the need to dial an 800 number to do a search has become extinct.

Related Stories:

• GOOG-411 Winds Down, Bing-411 Parties On
• Verizon Enters The ‘Voice Search’ Fray With 1-800-THE-INFO
• Google Voice Local Search Launched
• Microsoft Announces Tellme Acquisition

Experiment Confirmed

I noticed these appearing yesterday in my own search results, and Google has confirmed that there’s an experiment happening:

We’re always experimenting with ways to improve search, but we have nothing to announce at this time.

Google does indeed often experiment with new formats, randomly tagging some visitors to see the formats being tested. I apparently was one of those tagged. Most people, however, won’t see some of the examples I’ll share below, as they’re not tagged into the experiment.

I think that will change in the near future, because as I’ll explain at the end, this is one test that I suspect will go fully live soon.

TV Shows

Here’s what I see in a search for Lost:

You can see off to the right-hand side there’s a little summary about the TV show “Lost” that’s drawn from Wikipedia. Cast members are listed, along with a “People also search for” area showing other TV shows that seem related to Lost.

In the previous test last November, this box was called “Sources.” That label is now gone. I’m continuing to call it the “Sources” box for want of a better name.

Actors

Clicking on the links generates a new Google search along with further information. Here’s a close-up of what’s shown for Evangeline Lilly:

Movies

Similar units appear for movies, such as this for in a search for Avengers:

Music & Bands

Musical groups like U2 appear:

People

There’s also extended information about some people, apparently if they are listed in Wikipedia. For example, a search for “dooce” brings up extended information about blogger Heather Armstrong, who is known by that name:

Books

Even books can get a special display:

With Or Without Google+

None of the units are dependent on Google+, nor are they part of Search Plus Your World. They appear whether you’re signed in or not, whether you use Google+ or not. But if you are part of Google+, the units might get additional information.

For example, signed-out, I see this for a search on the TV show New Girl:

Signed-in, since I follow the New Girl page on Google+, information from that appears in a “From your circles” area above the sources box:

New Format For Direct Answers Live For Everyone?

Google is also showing direct answers that come from different sources. Bas van den Beld from State Of Search also appears to be in the test and noted that for a search on “hot fuzz director,” he got a direct answer like this:

This is similar to what you see at Bing for the same search, where the information is disclosed as coming from Freebase, a service that Google owns:

However, these direct answers don’t seem part of the sources experiment. For example, using my Chrome browser in “incognito” mode, which keeps me out of the Google sources test, I can still make these boxes appear, such as this for “avengers cast:”

Is This The “Search Refresh” The WSJ Wrote About?

Direct answers like these have long been part of Google. The formats, however, seem new. The addition of the sources box also suggests that what the Wall Street Journal wrote about earlier this year, about Google offering more direct and semantic answers, is about to happen.

In WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!, I took the WSJ article to task because I thought it overhyped what was likely to happen, which was Google expanding things that it already does.

That still seems to be the case. This will no doubt be a big change to hit Google. But it will also be one of those “evolutionary not revolutionary” type of changes.

If you see these boxes, then you’re one of the few who have also been tagged as part of the experiment. If you don’t, then there’s not much you can do but wait. It seems likely they’ll eventually come for everyone.

Related Articles

• Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack
• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts
• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates
• Google Buys Metaweb To Bolster Answers, Google Squared & Rich Snippets
• Confirmed: Google Testing New “Sources” Display In Search Results
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• WSJ Says Big Google Search Changes Coming? Reality Check Time!

Here is a picture:

Both these forums support the functionality of labeling an answer to the question as a “top answer.” Google is clearly picking up on that, structuring the data as such and then displaying that directly in the search results.

This is all likely part of Google’s ongoing, slow and consistent effort of building out their semantic search engine.

Google has expanded this over time with forum sitelinks and listing the number of posts in a specific thread or blog post. This is just one more step in that direction.

Hat tip to Frederik Hyldig from SEOPORT.

Related Stories:

• Google Adds Visited Pages, Past Hour & Fewer Shopping Sites Filtering
• Up Close With Google Search Options
• Google Starts To Classify Content Types In Web Search
• Google Rolls Out Sitelinks Display For Forums
• Google’s Last Visited Time Stamp Gets Down To The Minute
• Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates

Beyond Blue Links!

From the story, we learn things such as:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

and:

The company is aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called “semantic search,” which refers to the process of understanding the actual meaning of words.

and:

Amit Singhal, a top Google search executive, said in a recent interview that the search engine will better match search queries with a database containing hundreds of millions of “entities”—people, places and things—which the company has quietly amassed in the past two years. Semantic search can help associate different words with one another, such as a company (Google) with its founders ( Larry Page and Sergey Brin).

Be sure to read the full article. I don’t want to be doing too many extended quotes out of it. But having read it several times myself, I keep trying to understand what’s new here.

Google’s Existing Semantic Search & Direct Answers

Google’s arguably been doing semantic search since 2003, when it began searching for synonyms of the words actually entered. It has increased its understanding of the meaning of words over the years and even did a detailed blog post about this in 2010. Here’s another from 2009:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and “quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need.

As for “spitting out” those “facts and direct answers” that the WSJ story talks about, Google’s been doing that for so long that it’s hard for me to even know exactly when it all began.

Meet The Google OneBox, Plus Box, Direct Answers & The 10-Pack from 2009 covers how direct answers were provided in response to a variety of searches, and many of these answers were already integrated into Google for years before that was written.

UPS & FedEx tracking reports, along with flight status updates, a built-in calculator and more. Had it in 2004. Movie information and stock charts? 2005. Music and weather? 2006. Sports scores? 2009.

Here’s Google blogging about “Just the facts, fast” in 2005:

Have you ever needed a piece of info right now? Today we’re excited to introduce Google Q&A.

We’ve pulled together facts from all over the Web to help give you the fastest possible access to the quick bits of information you need every day; just type a query into the search box, and you’ll get back the answer at the top of your search results. Q&A knows about a lot of areas: celebrities, countries of the world, the planets, the elements, electronics, movies, and anything else we’ve thought of so far (including enabling you to get answers on your mobile device).

Try it out, and keep checking back. This is only the beginning.

Google Squared Still Lives

How about extracting facts from pages, to figure out things like the inventor of the telephone or when a movie release will happen. Google touted doing all this using its Google Squared technology in 2010. See here on the Google blog and our own stories:

• Google Squared Powers Answer Sources & Something Different Refinements
• Google Goes Beyond Answers, Starts Guessing Release Dates

By the way, Google even was offering facts like the sexual orientation of celebrities, though this was dropped last year.

Honestly, it sounds like Google is just going to ramp up showing results that come from its Google Squared technology, as well as what’s been built since its Freebase / Metaweb acquistion. The WSJ mentions the latter, but not Google Squared:

But the newest change is expected to go much further, coming as a result of Google’s acquisition in 2010 start-up Metaweb Technologies, which had an index of 12 million entities, such as movies, books, companies and celebrities….

Mr. Singhal said Google and the Metaweb team, which then numbered around 50 software engineers, have since expanded the size of the index to more than 200 million entities, partly by developing “extraction algorithms,” or mathematical formulas that can organize data scattered across the Web.

It also approached organizations and government agencies to obtain access to databases, including the CIA World Factbook, which houses up-to-date encyclopedic information about countries worldwide.

Google Squared was closed as a stand-alone service last year, but the technology has remained a part of Google search. These articles explain more about it:

• Google Squared Is Now Live
• Up Close With Google Squared & Some Wolfram Alpha Thoughts

Why If There’s PR Smoke, There Might Be No Fire

If all this isn’t really new, why’s it getting played up so big with the Wall Street Journal, as well as Mashable last month? Mashable even quoted Google talking about its “knowledge graph” for the first time that I’ve seen.

My take is that Google’s pushing these technologies for some good PR, and they are in turn being blown up out of proportion to what will really happen.

Google’s been under intense pressure in some quarters since rolling out Search Plus Your World, pressure that its results aren’t as good as in the past. It’s helpful to counter that type of bad PR with interviews talking up forward-looking technologies. Heck, it’s right out of Bing’s playbook.

Remember Bing & Powerset?

If you believed all the forward-looking stuff that Bing has pushed, you’d have expected Google to have been a whimpering child of a search engine cowering in the corner, at this point.

Why remember Powerset, with all that amazing semantic technology that Bing later acquired? Here, read up on it:

• Powerset Launches “Understanding Engine” For Wikipedia Content
• Official: Microsoft Buys Powerset

Sure, Powerset is part of Bing. Did you notice it making Bing significantly better than Google? Has Bing drawn tons more people over to it from Google for having that technology?

Nope. But that doesn’t stop Bing from talking it up, though it seems to have done less of that lately. Powerset is good technology to have. It might lead to important future improvements. But no instant revolution is about to pour forth from it, nor has it.

Remember Bing & Wolfram Alpha?

Heck, remember when Wolfram Alpha partnered up with Bing? This was after Wolfram Alpha’s factually-based search engine failed to wipe Google off the map, as some assumed it would. Here are some reminders of that:

• How To Overhype Your Search Engine
• Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”
• Bing Launches Wolfram Alpha Collaboration & Several New Search Features

For all that the direct answers were supposed to be important, I can’t even get Bing to trigger some of the examples it touted when linking up with Wolfram Alpha.

Make no mistake. Wolfram Alpha is a cool, useful search engine. In fact, I had a long, excellent conversation with Stephen Wolfram on Monday while at the SXSW conference about how things are going and some interesting things to come. Stay tuned.

But it’s important to distinguish between what’s put out as PR versus what’s likely to happen in reality. Bing’s done a lot of big talk, and when that big talk has done nothing to stall Google’s market share, it still keeps talking big. This past piece from me explains more about that:

• Dear Bing & Yahoo: Pushing Deck Chairs Around Isn’t A Good Plan

Why’s Google Talking Big?

Google’s doing some big talk of its own now, which as I said, is probably being interpreted as even bigger than it really is. But why this specific talk about direct answers and understanding?

For one, Google shot itself in the foot last year. At the D Conference, WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg pointed out to Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt that Google didn’t do as good as job as Bing in providing direct answers. And Schmidt agreed! From my coverage then:

Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It was crazy. Mossberg wasn’t right. What the hell is “some” cases supposed to mean. In “some” other cases, Google has more. But overall, no one has any idea who provides more direct answers, much less meaningful direct answers. No one. Mossberg didn’t inventory this himself. There’s no third-party survey out there. It’s not like there’s some “direct answers app store” listing answers that you can count.

That was just Mossberg, in my view, saying what he believed in his gut. It was Schmidt, to me, kind of cowering against Mossberg. He is, after all, Walt Mossberg. You don’t just tell him he’s wrong. Even if he is.

As a result, Google positioned itself as being weak to the leading tech journalist on the planet. How do you pull yourself out of that?

The Siri Problem

I know! Maybe you start talking about all those direct answers you’re going to do? Make sure you do that fairly quickly, because you’ve got another problem brewing.

While your latest Android 4 mobile operating system has arguably made it harder for people to search by voice — and while most Android phones still haven’t been upgraded to it — those iPhone 4S phones all equipped with Siri sold like hotcakes.

What’s Siri doing? Sending some of the searches people do not to you (as you’d think that deal you have with Apple would require) but instead over to Yelp and Wolfram Alpha.

You know, like 25 percent of the voice searches people are doing with Siri. That’s a lot of searches.

The press noticed that. They also noticed when Apple distanced itself from Google Maps in the latest version of iOS. You even had a financial analyst trying to figure if the end of a Google-Apple deal would harm Google’s bottom line. That got press attention, too.

If you’re Google looking at all this, it becomes even more important to start talking about how you have this Wolfram Alpha-like fact engine that you’re churning up. Heck, you even rolled out a Wolfram Alpha-like graphical math calculator last year.

What To Expect

To sum up, Google’s already said several times over the past year or so that it would be providing more and more direct answers. It sounds like that’s the biggest thing that’s likely to be released in the coming months.

Those direct answers potentially take traffic away from a relatively small set of sites that try to serve up direct answers, such as the height of Mount McKinley. That’s sad for those sites, but it’s good for the searcher. And it shouldn’t impact the much larger set of sites out there with broader information.

Indeed, you can already see this now:

You can see the direct answer at the top. The three arrows from that area show how some of the sources also get surfaced as regular results. Below that, the fourth arrow highlights how another site appears.

Having the direct answer might prevent some searchers from clicking through to any of these. But with the answer already in some of the page descriptions, they probably weren’t clicking much already.

There have also been reports that Google’s working on a better version of Google Voice Actions, a version that’s more assistant-like, in the way Siri is. It might even get called Majel. That sounds reasonable, especially given how long various Googlers have talked about wanting to have a Star Trek-like computer (as voiced by Majel Barrett-Roddenberry).

But in the end, for all that the search engines have talked for years about going beyond “10 blue links,” I’d be surprised if the changes the WSJ story today talks about dramatically alter what we see now on Google. More answers, sure. But those 10 blue links will still likely remain the core of what’s shown.

For Google’s part, when I emailed for any comment, it replied with: ”We have nothing specific to announce at this time.”

I’ll be following up to see if I can pry anything more on-the-record about this.

Postscript: Google’s Amit Singhal, who heads Google’s search efforts and who was cited in the WSJ story, has posted to Google+ to say:

Some recent news coverage about Google has sparked interest in where we are and where we’re headed in search.

Let me just say that every day, we’re improving our ability to give you the best answers to your questions as quickly as possible. In doing so, we convert raw data into knowledge for millions of users around the world. But our ability to deliver this experience is a function of our understanding your question and also truly understanding all the data that’s out there. And right now, our understanding is pretty darn limited. Ask us for “the 10 deepest lakes in the U.S,” and we’ll give you decent results based on those keywords, but not necessarily because we understand what depth is or what a lake is.

In 2010, we acquired Freebase, an open-source knowledge graph, and in the time since we’ve grown it from 12 million interconnected entities and attributes to over 200 million. Our vision for this knowledge graph is as a tool to aid the creation of more knowledge — an endless cycle of creativity and insight.

But as I explained in an interview last month [ED note: the Mashable interview I mentioned above], our initial steps towards this virtuous cycle are indeed baby steps. So stay tuned for updates on what will continue to be a long road ahead.

The last part is key in all this: “the long road ahead.” I think that underscores the point of what I’ve written, that you’re unlikely to see a massive change to how Google search looks and operates in the near term.

Related Articles

• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• How Siri Patches Up The iPhone’s Voice Search Weakness Vs. Android
• Head To Head: Siri Vs. Google Voice Actions
• Why Siri + Yelp = Useless Google Maps On The iPhone 4S
• Not Just Google: Siri Searches Bing And Yahoo Too
• Google Buys Clever Sense: An Answer To Siri?
• Google Faces “Innovator’s Dilemma” As It Prepares Response To Siri
• US Subpoenas Apple For Details About Default iOS Google Search Deal
• When Everyone Gets The Vote: Social Shares As The New Link Building

The findings come out of a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Around 2,000 adults in the US were questioned between January 20 and February 19 of this year as part of a wide-ranging poll about search engine use, though fewer may have answered particular questions.

Personalized Search: A Bad Thing

People were asked how they’d feel if a search engine tracked what they searched for, then used that information to personalize their future search results:

Rather than a straight yes/no option, the choices gave some context. From the chart above about views on personalized search:

• 65% said it was a “bad thing” since, as the response said, “it may limit the information you get online and what search results you see”
• 29% said it was a “good thing” because “it gives you results that are more relevant you.”

By Demographics

The survey also broke down responses to the question about personalized search by age, income level and race:

Generally speaking, the older someone was, the less they agreed with personalized search. The percentage of those who said it was bad by age group:

• 18-29: 56%
• 30-49: 67%
• 50+: 70%

A similar pattern was true by income group. The more you earn, the more you’re likely to consider personalized search to be bad. The percentages disagreeing with it by income:

• Less than $30,000: 45% (the most favorable of all groups)
• $30,000 to $74,999: 68%
• $75,000: 75%

Whites were far more likely to disagree with it than Blacks/Hispanics as a combined group (70% to 50%).

Invasion Of Privacy

The survey also asked the same question but with a different set of possible answers, these designed to tell if tracking searches was deemed a privacy invasion:

Again, rather than a straight yes/no option, there was context to each choice:

• 73% overall said they were “Not OK” with personalized search, since they felt it was an invasion of their privacy
• 83% of those 50+ viewed it as a privacy invasion
• 69% of those 18-29 viewed it as as an invasion
• 68% of those 30-49 viewed it as an invasion

Some History & Perspective On Personalized Search

There’s no way to tell if all the attention personalized search has had lately is generating more negative views than in the past. That’s because Pew hasn’t surveyed views on personalized search before, to my knowledge. But those surveyed now clearly did not like it.

The new findings will likely give fresh ammunition to those who oppose personalized search, especially as conducted by Google. It follows on another survey last month that found largely negative views.

However, it’s worth noting that personalized search has been the norm at Google for over two years and at Bing for just over a year. Even if you’re not logged into either search engine, they’re personalizing your results.

The fact that most people haven’t objected, or gone out of their way to prevent even logged-out personalization from happening, probably means that they really don’t understand the ways that personalization can be helpful. Last November, Google had a very good post explaining some of the benefits.

Yes, I know — it’s Google, of course they’re going to push the benefits. But so does Bing. Yes, I know, Bing wants to personalize results just to make money off searchers in the same way as Google. True.

But it’s also true that some personalization can indeed be helpful, especially in a web full of crud. Just over a year ago, people were screaming that Google’s search results were being overrun by garbage, which resulted in the Panda Update. But filtering can only do so much. Personalization is also a useful signal.

Preventing Fears From Becoming Real

The challenge is when the search engines go to far. Google’s Search Plus Your World launched earlier this year dramatically increased the amount of personalized results that were visible (though ironically, it also made it far easier to turn off the personalization that had been happening since December 2009).

Google faced pretty severe backlash in the mainstream and tech press, though regular users really didn’t seem to notice or care about the change.

My view tends to be that no one likes the idea of personalization. There’s fear that you’ll be stuck in what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble. Or that you’ll be in that bad feedback loop like at Amazon, where you get terrible recommendations based on an odd one-time purchase. And there are real privacy worries about having all your searches — some of which can be intensely personal — recorded.

I think when you ask anyone about personalization, the reaction they have will be far more negative than in their actual routine. If they’re educated more about it, if you give them more context, a knee-jerk “it’s bad” response can often turn into a “maybe.” I’ve seen this happen when I’ve spoken with people on the topic.

That’s not to take away that people do have real concerns. It just remains to be seen if those concerns on paper turn into walking away from Google and Bing to the likes of Duck Duck Go or other “private” search engines we covered recently. Certainly if the major search engines don’t show care to these concerns, that may increase the odds.

More From The Survey

We’ll be breaking down different aspects of the complete Pew survey in the coming days. So far, here’s our other coverage:

• Pew Survey: 68% View Targeted Ads Negatively; 59% Have Noticed Targeting

More On Personalized Search

And here are some related background pieces on personalized search:

• Search 4.0: Social Search Engines & Putting Humans Back In Search
• Google Now Personalizes Everyone’s Search Results
• Google’s Personalized Results: The “New Normal” That Deserves Extraordinary Attention
• Bing Results Get Localized & Personalized
• A Conversation With Eli Pariser Of “The Filter Bubble”
• Study Asks, Can You Trust Google’s Personalized Search Results?
• Survey: People Largely Negative About Google’s Personalized Search Results
• Google’s Results Get More Personal With “Search Plus Your World”
• Two Weeks In, Google Says “Search Plus Your World” Going Well, Critics Should Give It Time
• FAQ: What’s The Debate About Google’s Search Plus Your World?
• Scroogle’s Gone? Here’s Who Still Offers Private Searching

Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often wondered if the company would allow users to use their extremely powerful computing infrastructure to analyze their own data along with data sets available on the open web.

Well, they have and that’s what Wolfram|Alpha Pro is all about. As I wrote a few week’s ago, I’m a frequent W|A user and long-time admirer of the company and it’s founder, Stephen Wolfram. I think they’ve scored again.

The service has an introductory rate of $4.99/month with a reduced rate of $2.99/month for students. The company offers pricing for the enterprise. So, what does this initial launch offer?

Wolfram|Alpha Pro: Key Features

• Ability to Analyze Your Own Datasets Input of upload a data set and let Wolfram’s technology automatically recognize and analyze the data. For example, a timeline of your email, your credit card expenses, or a data set obtained from Data.gov.

• Data in more than 60 file formats can be uploaded and analyzed. From an XLS spreadsheet to an HTML document to the audio in a WAV file. Image files (in many formats) can also be analyzed. As you would expect, many science and math formats are also included.

• Access to extended keyboards like the one available with the Wolfram|Alpha mobile apps.

• Visualized and interactive results using the CDF (computational data format) that Wolfram launched last July.

What’s not available today is the ability to publish and compare, comment on or share results. According to Stephen Wolfram, these options are forthcoming.

I’ll can say now that while some of what Wolfram|Alpha Pro has to offer might not be for everybody today it very likely will be in the future as the amount of data available to analyze (personal data and publicly available datasets) continues to skyrocket.

In other words, Wolfram|Alpha pro is getting in on the ground floor of personal data analysis with a powerful but at the same time very easy to use tool that will appeal to everyone as data analysis moves out of the lab and office and into just about everyplace else.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: On February 8th, Stephen Wolfram posted more details about this Pro offering on their blog.

This means select BMW vehicles (see below for list) and is available in the US only for now. However Yelp’s international coverage makes it probable that the partnership will roll out more broadly if it proves successful in the US.

Yelp offered some screens of the BMW in-car search on its blog:

Select models that can access the Yelp content include the following:

• 2009 and later Z4, 1, 3 and 7 Series
• 2010 and later 5 and 6 Series
• 2010 and later X5 and X6
• 2011 and later X3

Google, Bing and Mapquest have mapping and local search deals with various car makers. Ford has also invested in making its Sync in-dash navigation and content system compatible with numerous smartphones. This is the direction that we’ll see more and more carmakers go: integration of smartphone apps into in-dash content systems.

The Yelp-BMW announcement is a high-profile deal that may boost confidence in its forthcoming IPO among some investors. The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 million through a public offering that will likely happen in Q1 of next year.

Yelp previously reported that 40 percent of its query volume is now coming from mobile devices. Add BMW to the list.

Related Entries

• Google Maps “Send To Car” Running Out Of Gas?
• Bing Scores First In-Car Search Deal With Toyota
• Send To (German) Car: The New Local Search Front
• MapQuest Partners With GM’s OnStar For ‘Send to Car‘ Directions
• Google Maps Now With “Send To Garmin”
• Send To TomTom: Google Maps Partners With Personal Nav Device Maker

Siri, the voice recognition app that comes standard with the new iPhone, can be used to control text messaging and reminders inside the device. But it can also be used as a search tool, to call up specific information from the outside world.

With the mobile search space already in flux, Siri adds a game-changing angle, particularly for marketers that want to reach the lucrative (presumably affluent) iPhone audience.

Here are some factors for businesses to consider as Siri grows in both audience and usage:

• Siri works. Siri’s voice recognition is nearly flawless, and its utility right now is only limited by the APIs that Apple has given it to work with. It’s likely that the API list will grow, giving iPhone users access to pretty much any form of information they can verbally request.
• Siri is a velvet rope. Apple’s choice of APIs to power Siri will, in effect, choose the leading search tools for the iPhone. As Danny Sullivan and Greg Sterling reported, an iPhone user can ask Siri to use Bing or Yahoo to perform a search. But Google is the default, and most users will take the default option if it serves them well.
• Pick your battle. For any given business, there will be one all-important API that needs to know who you are. Today, that’s pretty much limited to Google Search, Google Places and Yelp. But in the future, Apple may add APIs to cover more niches. For example, if one of the many physician portals is chosen as the API for look-ups, then it will be very important for doctors to get listed there.
• Make that two APIs. Google is also advancing the voice recognition functions on Android, and may match Siri for ease of use. If so, you can expect their “Siri” (“Andrew”?) to become the lead search method on many other smartphones. In which case, all the planning implied above gets doubled, with two tracks of promotional tactics to hit both platforms.
• Siri likes keywords. When searching for restaurants that serve ravioli, Siri returns a list of places that mention ravioli in their Yelp reviews. Yes folks, keyword optimization is still very much the name of the game.
• Siri localizes by default. “Show me restaurants” uses the Location Services in my iPhone to correctly assume that I want a list of Boston restaurants.
• Punjabi “Dubba”. One of my favorite Indian places is Punjabi Dhaba, a fast-paced joint that serves fresh, hot Indian on mess-hall steel trays. But Siri can’t understand the name. Fortunately, they happen to be No. 1 when you ask for a list of Indian places in Cambridge. In this case, attention to both keywords and category choices can help make up for a name that voice recognition systems find challenging.

Siri can find restaurants by type, and even by keyword, but sometimes has difficulty recognizing names.

As Apple continues to develop Siri, we’ll see what directions it (she?) takes, and I’ll post updates here to track how it impacts mobile search marketing.

When you look at the type schema you see close to 300 metadata elements that can describe various entities (called Things here).

There is lot of specificity in a few categories such as Local Businesses, Civic Structures and Events. Two of these categories have real implications for local and mobile SEO because of the richness of the metadata.

Below you see the high-level organizational taxonomy for the MicroData entities. It has up to five levels depending upon which category you are looking at. Here you see that three levels are associated with Local Business, while the Persons and Product groups have no subcategories.

Things

The high-level property elements for Things include Name, URL, Image and Description. These properties are applied to all of the following seven subcategories.

1. Creative Work — Text and metadata include ratings, reviews and offers.
2. Events — Metadata elements includes time, who, place and related events.
3. Intangibles — This is dynamic metadata about quantities and values.
4. Organizations — Metadata to include location, founders, employees and contact info.
5. Persons — Metadata includes title, awards, affiliations, family relationships, personal information and contact information.
6. Places — Metadata about photos, maps, addresses and contact information
7. Products — Metadata about brand, model, manufacturer and reviews.

Let’s take a look at each of these seven categories in a little more detail to see what might be valuable to a B2B marketing executive. Not all will be useful; some will be pure media plays, while others will be B2C oriented.

Creative Works

The properties available in the Creative Works category are metadata elements used to describe all the elements of a piece of creative work. This includes things like identifying headlines, the editor, genre and author. Many more properties are described at the creative works link above.

The properties apply to all the subcategories in the Creative Works group, which include the following types:

Events

Eleven properties are available in the Events category for describing web pages that contain event information. Events can also be broken into super or subevents. For example, if you are putting on several presentations at trades shows, these can be called out individually. Subcategories for events include:

Intangibles

The four properties available in the Intangibles category describe dynamic or intangible data. Examples include the format of a book, the condition of an item, the price, the availability and the seller of the item. Sub-categories include:

Organizations

The 16 properties available in the Organizations category are for classifying data elements that deal with common company information. A large number of the properties focus on contact information, company facts and employees. There are also ratings and review properties.

Person

There are 27 properties available in the Persons category for classifying data elements about a person. You find properties that describe organizational affiliations, alumni status, job title, nationality and the name of the person’s spouse.

There are no subcategories for the Persons group, which is surprising. When you review business websites in any number you see a handful of very defined groups of people. Almost every website has a listing for their Board of Directors, C-level executive, advisory / technical boards and other named teams.

Often, the names of investors are provided as well. You could tag a person with the job title property. If you have a board with seven members you would have to do this seven times. Having a named subgroup that includes more than one individual makes more sense because this reflects current common practice on the Internet.

Place

The 12 properties in the Places category describe unique locations such as a building or a landform. You can specify that a place is part of a larger geographic location. Beyond this the properties are what you would expect: maps, photos, address and telephone numbers.

The Local Business subgroup below is the same one found in the Organizations category.

Products

The seven properties in the Products category are for describing the elements of a product. These properties include specifying a brand name, the manufacturer’s name and product identification numbers, to name a few.

Given the prominent role that products play in Internet commerce, I was surprised at how few properties there are, and I think this will be an issue for successfully deploying the MicroData standard.

Here are some of the elements that I think are missing:

• High-level designation: is it a B2B product or a B2C product.
• Age range for the intended product.
• Industry target: e.g., healthcare, entertainment, financial and technology.
• Product category: e.g., books, clothing, garden, grocery and sports.
• Gender: shoes for example.
• Price or price range.

To be fair, some of these properties are found in the Intangibles category, such as price and seller property. But why these properties are there instead of in Products is a real mystery.

The second problem with this category is there are no subcategories at all for the Products group. It’s almost impossible to find a shopping site that does not have a product taxonomy that is used to navigationally organize company’s wares.

These taxonomies exist for a reason: They work for both the website owner and the consumer. This section really needs to be expanded in the next version of the MicroData specification.

Local Business

I mentioned earlier that a couple of categories had lot of subcategories in its hierarchy. Local Business (part of Organizations) is one example with 27 subgroups that break down into 120 categories.

One of the Local Businesses subcategories called Stores has 30 subcategories in its group alone.

Business names could be used to complement what is missing in the Product category, but it’s far from optimal. For example there is no Internet, Software or Technology categories in the existing taxonomy. The subcategories for Local Business include:

• Animal Shelter
• Automotive Business (ten subcategories)
• Child Care
• Dry Cleaning / Laundry
• Emergency Service (three subcategories)
• Employment Agency
• Entertainment Business (seven subcategories)
• Financial Service (four subcategories)
• Food Establishment (eight subcategories)
• Government Office (one subcategories)
• Health And Beauty Business (five subcategories)
• Home And Construction Business (eight subcategories)
• Internet Cafe
• Library
• Lodging Business (four subcategories)
• Medical Organization (seven subcategories)
• Professional Service (ten subcategories)
• Radio Station
• Real Estate Agent
• Recycling Center
• Self-Storage
• Shopping Center
• Sports Activity Location
• Store (30 subcategories)
• Television Station
• Tourist Information Center
• Travel Agency

Data Type

The Data Type feels like it is unfinished. Sometimes it’s useful to describe content at a high-level as structured (e.g., numbers) or unstructured data (e.g., text). There is value in specifying a structured data element if you have complex web pages with tables, graphs and text.

For example, being able to define a table, having it survive the indexing process intact as a single entity and returning it as a single search result is certainly valuable. Being able to define an image as a chart or an Excel table would also be useful, but these data types are not supported.

• Boolean
• Date
• Number
• Text

Summary

When you look at the subcategories for most of the above groups, it’s easy to see how the MicroData specification is of value, especially the Local Business category. For example, the properties in Local Business provide more markup opportunities for your local SEO strategy.

However, the lack of definition in the Product category makes this a less-than-compelling tool for those firms that sell brick and mortar products through their websites.