SEARCH engines have barely changed since Google was founded in 1998. Sure, they run on blazingly fast servers and are powered by sophisticated algorithms, but the experience itself is basically the same: users enter a word or two and the engine spits out links to the most relevant pages.
That is about to change.Last month, Google
rolled out its "knowledge graph", which serves up facts and services in response to search terms - not just links to websites. It is the latest step in a process in which search engines are morphing into something quite new: vast brains that respond directly to questions posed in everyday language.
"Search does a good job of returning pages," says Shashidhar Thakur of Google. "But we can go beyond that and return knowledge."
Links are not necessarily the best way to answer a query. When I search for "location of Arsenal Football Club", for example, I would prefer to get a direct answer telling me the address of the club's ground in London, rather than a link to a document containing the information. Google and Microsoft's Bing can already provide direct answers to a small number of queries, but the range and depth of those answers is about to expand dramatically.
Over the past few years, Google and Microsoft have been quietly compiling vast knowledge databases to help them do this. Their stores have been built from publicly available information, such as Wikipedia pages, as well as prices from retail websites and user reviews. "All the things that describe an object are scattered across the web," says
Stefan Weitz, director of Bing Search. "The challenge is to bring them together."
From:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21428676.400-why-google-will-soon-answer-your-questions-directly.html
