Today, Google announced a new feature they’re calling “Knowledge Graph.” I’m still having a little bit of a hard time understanding why it’s such a big deal. Basically, it seems that if you search for a popular topic (like “George Washington”), a window will pop up to the right of the search results with basic info on it. It also doesn’t work with many topics.

You can read more about it at The New York Times and watch the video below.

I’m more interested, though, in a comment a Google engineer made in a BBC article on Knowledge Graph:

The next step, Mr Singhal said, is to look at how the site can answer more complex questions, such as “What are the 10 deepest lakes in Africa?”

In doing so the search engine would need to draw on multiple sources and factor in many different criteria.

Now that would be very useful to students, since search engines offer very mixed quality results for that kind of “semantic search.”

You might also be interested in The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners.