In the final installment of this 2-part edition of Here’s Why, Eric gives Mark more predictions about where he thinks Google is headed in 2015. Specifically, they talk about Google’s Knowledge Graph as it currently stands and the advances they believe will be made to it in the coming year. Eric also explains the methodology and brief results of a study conducted by Perficient Digital to test the current state of the Knowledge Graph and see just how good Google it is at answering your questions.
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Full Transcript:
Mark: Welcome to Part 2 of this special edition of Here’s Why. In today’s part, we’re going to ask Eric about some more advances that he thinks Google might make in the coming year.
Mark: So Eric, the Knowledge Graph is a big change in search in recent years, what do you expect to happen with that in 2015?
Eric: I thought you’d never ask, so thank you. We just recently published a study, where we looked at 850,000 queries to see which of those Google would provide a rich answer to. It was fascinating because Google responded to 20% of the queries, which to me is huge, I didn’t expect it to be that big. When you think about how we pulled the queries, we did that by looking at Google suggest or as they call it now “Google Predictions”, as well as Bing, suggest and we pulled out 500,000 queries with that method.
The other 350,000 queries were created by having a building place, such as the Eiffel Tower, and we would fashion queries around that. For example, how tall is the Eiffel Tower? Where is the Eiffel Tower? Who built the Eiffel Tower? Those kinds of queries. They’re queries that we picked because we thought there was a decent chance that they would provide a rich answer result. So even though 20% was higher than I expected, it’s actually still low compared to where I expect Google to get to. I think they’re going to put a lot of effort into driving that number up, it may be 30% or 40% by the end of the year.
Mark: Wow. You can see the full results of that study in the links below. So Eric, it’s going to take a lot of resources, I imagine, to bring the kind of improvements you expect to see; what kind of investments do you think Google is going to make to head in that direction?
Eric: They have a large internal staff already and I expect them to continue to grow that staff, but you can also expect them to make some acquisitions related to this. Some of them might not be directly related when you see them initially, for example, acquiring an artificial intelligence technology or something along those lines, but they will ultimately feed into their ability to improve the scope of the Knowledge Graph results in search.
Mark: Great. Thanks again for joining us for this special 2 part “Predictions of 2015” and check out the link that will come up in a moment to subscribe to our channel where you can find this video as well as many other informative videos. As always, any resources that we mentioned in this video will be in the links below. We’ll see you next time for another edition of Here’s Why.
Very informative two-parter. It’s good to have some insight on what Google will be doing this coming year. Thanks so much for sharing!