Google is no longer satisfied with being the largest search engine on the web, as well as the most visited website on the Internet. It now wants to save users the time it takes to click on outbound links by directly providing answers as well.Wait, didn't Ask Jeeves try that already? And, considering Ask Jeeves died and became Ask.com, I’m guessing the question-based search engine struggled. (It probably got too many complaints when it was unable to answer questions like, "When will I meet the love of my life?") Google doesn't aim to provide answers to life's most important questions (yet), but rep Shashidhar Thakur explained to New Scientist that it hopes to give more detailed and informative answers to everyday concerns, such as "where's the nearest subway stop?" and "what's the exact address of this restaurant?" So perhaps Google’s trying take on Siri, which is fitting considering Apple’s declared war on Google Maps.Google plans to become an answer guru by using answers pulled from its knowledge graph, which is essentially a network of people and places and relationships between them. The graph contains 500 million things, and over 3.5 billion facts and relationships. Google's accumulated all this knowledge from open sources like Wikipedia, but also mysterious-sounding “internal data.”A side note about this internal data — I recently went to a show in Brooklyn, during which the lead singer screamed into the mic "It's my fucking birthday!" When I asked his girlfriend how old he was, she looked at the floor and mumbled something about how he doesn't like to share his age. So the first thing I did when I got home was google his name followed by "age?" and before I could even click on the Wikipedia page, there it was at the top corner of the screen: "approx. 31 years old."And this is where Google's new answer system enters the danger zone. I couldn't find the link to any article that provided the singer's age, and I definitely didn't read an interview in which he willingly gave it. It wasn't even on his Wikipedia page. Google did answer my question, even if it was at the cost of someone else's privacy. But privacy invasion is old news. But the difficulty in finding supporting information raised another question: If Google just spits out an answer to questions like a calculator, without context or references, how can we be sure it’s right?
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