Google Knowledge Graph

The Google Knowledge Graph is a structured database of real-world entities and the relationships between them that Google uses to augment its search results and downstream products. It was introduced in May 2012 and was described by engineer Amit Singhal in the launch post as a shift from indexing strings to understanding "things, not strings". At launch it contained roughly 500 million entities and about 3.5 billion facts; Google reported the corpus had tripled within seven months and covered around 570 million entities and 18 billion facts by the end of 2012. The graph stores information as subject-predicate-object triples and is built from a mix of public sources — including Wikipedia, Wikidata and the former Freebase project, which Google acquired with Metaweb in 2010 — licensed data feeds, and structured data crawled from the web via <a href="/knowledge/Schema.org" class="link" style="color: #D4A843;" title="Direct link to chunk">Schema.org Structured Data</a> markup. Editorial and algorithmic processes deduplicate, reconcile and rank entities for display. The most visible surface is the knowledge panel, the side-rail card that appears for entity queries such as people, places, organizations and creative works, but the graph also feeds direct answers, carousels, voice-assistant responses and the entity layer in Google Lens. A public Knowledge Graph Search API exists, though it exposes only a small fraction of the data and is intended for entity disambiguation rather than full graph access. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and other large platforms maintain analogous internal entity graphs that consume similar structured-data sources.