Google Knowledge Graph: Forcing businesses to amplify great content

Google’s Knowledge Graph is generating a lot of hype. For good reason too, it’s a big leap forward in the early stages of the semantic web.

A semantic web has context and not just content. This means that when you search for the Taj Mahal, as an example, you get results on the Taj Mahal that you were actually looking for. So if you were looking for the iconic building, that’s what you will find. If you were looking for the band that’s what you will find, and so on.

But how does Google do this? Well in short, Google are using metadata of known information and then marrying that to popular search data. This is then added to your personal search data to ensure that you are getting what you are looking for faster. By understanding the relationships between things, it is able to pull together comparisons that may not have been immediately apparent to you when you initially started searching and can therefore increase your frame of reference with regards to the content you are consuming.

Google’s been kicking around this concept for a while now. Back in 2011 it showed off something called Wonder Wheel. This was a product that linked keywords based on their perceived relevance to each other and was drawn from real searches and how users searched from one search string and then refined and shaped their subsequent searches based on the results that they got back. Knowledge Graph incorporates some of this wealth of knowledge and ramps it up.

What this does is change the search engine from being one that delivers data on your searches, to one the delivers contextually relevant knowledge that is infinitely more useful to you. As a searcher this is probably the best thing you have ever heard. Contextually relevant, kick-started research that is going to allow you to draw parallels that you might not originally have seen or thought to make? Brilliant!

Now let’s look at this from the other side; the side of your business. Now Google is in essence going to be placing your content directly next to your competitors content and telling the searcher that your content and your competitors content are contextually relevant to each other. Compelling content that differentiates itself is now more relevant than ever to your business.

Essentially, no longer will a “dumb”, primarily keyword driven algorithm be ranking your site against your competitors. Now the contextual relevance that naturally exists between your company and category similar competitor will be placing you directly next to each other and serving you both up to the user.

Information is no longer good enough. Contextually relevant, compelling content – not just written text – but content in all forms becomes incredibly powerful. The more often you are seen as being relevant to a central theme, the more often your content will show up against that of your competitors.

Let us not forget that this is a great move forward in ensuring that the right content gets to the user as quickly as possible. Google has spoken of ZMOT before; and winning the Zero Moment of Truth has just become even more real. With the Knowledge Graph coming in to play, the “first page of Google” being the ZMOT has now taken on a whole new meaning.

As the Knowledge Graph moves out of being exclusively on Google.com in the United States it is going to be an incredibly interesting trend to watch and see exactly how content is being served to, and further to that, consumed by searchers.