Google revamps search engine with Knowledge Graph

The new feature called Knowledge Graph is the latest fine-tuning to its search engine that gives search results on people, places, or things more relevant and informative responses.

Google said, "The next frontier in search is to understand real-world things and the relationships among them."

Amit Singhal, senior VP of engineering at Google, said in the company's blog post that the Knowledge Graph enables a user to search for things, people or places that Google knows about - landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more, and instantly get information that's relevant to the query.

A search for Taj Mahal will immediately bring up a list of facts, photos, and a map of the famous monument in India, as well as quick links to other popular similar sounding name like a Grammy Award-winning musician, or a casino in Atlantic City in New Jersey.

With the help of its 2010 acquisition of San Francisco-based Metaweb, which developed Freebase, Google conducted research for two years going through online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, the CIA Factbook and other sources to expand its database of 12 million items.

Freebase is a massive, collaboratively edited database of cross-linked data that allows anyone to contribute, structure, search, copy and use data.