Google’s Knowledge Graph Has An Error 20% Of The Time

Google’s knowledge graph which launched a little over a month ago is reportedly often wrong.

Conductor ran a study showing that for trending terms, the knowledge Google is providing via their knowledge graph is wrong about 20% of the time. By trending, Conductor looked at the top 50 ‘people’ in Google Trends and Google Insights and 1 out of 5 of them had outdated or wrong information.

For those in the Top 50 on Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list, Google is more often right, with only a 4% chance of the information being outdated. So combined, 12% of the answers in the knowledge graph are inaccurate according to Conductor.

Brian Ussery this morning wrote how even Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, entry has wrong information. It says he attended University of North Carolina School of Law when he never did actually go to law school, as far as I know.

Brian looked at how other Knowledge Graph entries are also wrong and then Conductor published their study showing the accuracy rate of the data in these knowledge graphs.

As you know, the data comes from sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and others and thus the answers are only as good as the data being sourced for this information.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.