The Future of Search: Beyond Words and into Knowledge Graph

The Future of Search: Beyond Words and into Knowledge Graph

In today's digital age, trust has become a crucial factor in advertising and brand messages. With an overwhelming amount of information available at our fingertips, consumers are becoming more discerning about the sources they trust. In a 2013 Nielsen online survey across 58 countries, it was found that word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, also known as earned advertising, are still the most influential. A staggering 84 percent of global respondents stated that they trust recommendations from their loved ones the most.

But trust in advertising is just one aspect of the evolving digital landscape. Search engines, like Google, have transformed from being a tool to find information to a means of self-discovery. The concept of "understanding" itself is still not fully grasped, as Singhal, a Google executive, points out. How humans comprehend and make sense of things is still a mystery. And this is where the future of search comes into play.

Google's Knowledge Graph, introduced in 2012, aims to go beyond words and understand the context and relationships between different entities. Rather than simply searching for a string of words, Google now seeks to find the "existence" of things. It wants to bridge the gap between related words and distance itself from unrelated ones. The ultimate goal of the Knowledge Graph is to enable computers to understand the world just as humans do.

The role of the Knowledge Graph is to make explicit connections between things that may have been overlooked in traditional search. When a user searches for "Michael Bloomberg," Google no longer just looks for web pages containing that string of words. Instead, it searches for the entity named "Michael Bloomberg." In Google's preferred terminology, these are not just strings, but things. The Knowledge Graph aims to transform strings of text into meaningful entities.

But what does this mean for the future of search? According to Esther Dyson, an investor and entrepreneur, the future lies in verbs. She recalls a conversation with Bill Gates, who told her that the future of search is in understanding what people want to do, not just what they want to know. Verbs are the key to understanding human intentions. If a search engine can understand the verbs, it can provide more relevant and precise results.

In the future, search engines will be built on three pillars: vast knowledge about user behavior and intentions, the transformation of strings into entities through the Knowledge Graph, and cutting-edge artificial intelligence research. This combination will enable search engines to not only assist users in finding information but also anticipate their needs before they are even aware of them.