Facebook Facebook. Facebook. Even Google, the last great Silicon Valley IPO, has become enamored lately, awed by the social network's stratospheric growth, pissed that Zuckerberg wouldn't let them in on the party, and equally scared that maybe, just maybe, Google had missed this whole "social" boat entirely.Those emotions turned near obsession in the last two years, as co-founder Larry Page took it upon himself to make his vulnerable, though still highly profitable, company relevant again. The final culmination was Google+, a highly rated, yet sparsely used social network that has so far done little to dent Facebook's dominance. Yeah, apparently it's a ghost town.Many of these developments, between the new privacy terms and in your face social integration all over the place, have left users, and even former employees, disillusioned with the company that once promised “Don’t Be Evil.” Has Google lost its way? Did Mark Zuckerberg just win? And when can I get one of those self-driving cars?But yesterday, Google went back to doing what Google is famous for: helping us find stuff. And not just find stuff, but, to parrot Google’s language, gain knowledge. It's called the Google Knowledge Graph, a database of about 500 million people, places and things, essentially an interconnected real-world map of information that helps the company figure out what users are really looking for – what geeks like to call "semantic search." (It’s still not clear exactly what the “graph” part means: a graph is a diagram showing the relation between typically two variable quantities, each measured along one of a pair of axes at right angles – that is, according to Google.)Semantic search and better categorization is also partly what powers WolframAlpha, the search computational knowledge engine by Stephen Wolfram that sits underneath Siri. And it’s partly an assault on Facebook, taking direct aim at its “social graph.” Social vs. knowledge: clearly there’s no contest there.In any case, Google the Search Engine just got a whole lot smarter:Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world's most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It's why we've been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a "graph"—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.So if you search for the term "Kings," which could be either the basketball team or maybe a TV show, you'll now get a pop-up on the righthand side with popular options so you can specify which "Kings" you actually mean. And you don't get just the Sacramento Kings, you get all the related stuff too. A search for "Frank Lloyd Wright" produces not only his bio and projects but also a list of his relevant contemporaries.Over time, the engine will only get smarter, as it continues to learn, soak up information, and create more connections. Eventually, Google will be able to answer questions like "Which governors of Western states have become president in the last 50 years?," a drastic shift from the way search works and thinks now.Danny Sullivan, the editor in chief of Search Engine Land, says that such developments are exactly what Google needs right now, or "people might start saying you guys don't care about search anymore."Or that you’re irrelevant, because, well, you’re not Facebook.Follow me: @sfnuop
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