Google, Chicken Fingers, and Marie Curie

Interesting blog from Google, lately...what? What's that? You don't keep up with Google's blog, and how their search engine works? Oh, right. That's why you hired us, right? Well, at any rate, there's a blog that they posted that is interesting to normal people, not just us geeky types that work at Addison Tech. It seems that they are slowly rolling out a new, more intelligent way of gleaning search results for their users, that they are calling the Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph will be able to tell more precisely what you are searching for, when you type “chicken fingers” into Google—ie, that you are wanting nearby restaurants who serve chicken fingers, rather than the origins for the chicken strip being called a “finger.”

That's great, you say. But how do they know what I'll be asking about? Are they spying on me? No, quit being so paranoid. They're looking at what other people are searching for, and clicking on when they search for chicken fingers. By the fact that few are looking at historical origins of chicken fingers, they know that the probability of you wanting that is low, therefore the higher clicked options—restaurants, recipes, etc, will rate higher on your search results. Google also says they're looking at relationships now, as well. So your chicken finger search may result in things that are related-but-not-precisely chicken fingers (the example they used was of Marie Curie and her family...much more effective than the chicken finger thing that we've been using here. No, really. Go read the blog post.) Both factors will influence your search results, therefore giving you—hopefully--a better and more accurate searching experience. Which will in turn help us at Addison Tech give your website a better ranking out in the interwebz.