1. History

Google announced its Knowledge Graph on May 16, 2012, as a way to significantly enhance the value of information returned by Google searches.^[1] Initially only available in English, the Knowledge Graph was expanded in December 2012 to Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.^[2] Support for Bengali was added in March, 2017.^[3]

The Knowledge Graph was powered in part by Freebase.^[1]

In August 2014, New Scientist reported that Google had launched Knowledge Vault.^[4] After publication, Google reached out to Search Engine Land to explain that Knowledge Vault was a research paper, not an active Google service, and in its report, Search Engine Land referenced indications by the company that "numerous models" were being experimented with to examine the possibility of automatically gathering meaning from text.^[5] The Knowledge Vault was meant to deal with facts, automatically gathering and merging information from across the Internet into a knowledge base capable of answering direct questions, such as "Where was Madonna born". In a 2014 report, the Vault was reported to have collected over 1.6 billion facts, 271 million of which were considered "confident facts", deemed to be more than 90% true. It was reported to be different from the Knowledge Graph in that it gathered information automatically rather than relying on crowd sourced facts compiled by humans.

2. Criticism

2.1. Lack of Source Attribution

By May 2016, knowledge boxes were appearing for "roughly one-third" of the 100 billion monthly searches the company processed. Dario Taraborelli, head of research at the Wikimedia Foundation, told The Washington Post that Google's omission of sources in its knowledge boxes "undermines people’s ability to verify information and, ultimately, to develop well-informed opinions". The publication also reported that the boxes are "frequently unattributed", such as a knowledge box on the age of actress Betty White, which is "as unsourced and absolute as if handed down by God".^[6]

2.2. Declining Wikipedia Article Readership

According to The Register, the implementation of direct answers in Google search results caused significant readership declines for Wikipedia, from which the Knowledge Graph obtains some of its information.^[7] The Daily Dot noted in 2014 that "Wikipedia still has no real competitor as far as actual content is concerned. All that's up for grabs are traffic stats. And as a nonprofit, traffic numbers don't equate into revenue in the same way they do for a commercial media site". After the article's publication, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, stated that it "welcomes" the knowledge panel functionality, that it was "looking into" the traffic drops, and that "We've also not noticed a significant drop in search engine referrals. We also have a continuing dialog with staff from Google working on the Knowledge Panel".^[8]