Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is Google's database of things rather than pages: entities, their attributes, and the relationships between them, each stored against a machine ID.

Knowledge Graph is Google's own name for the system, introduced in 2012. The generic term knowledge graph is used across computer science for any entity-and-relationship store.

Practitioners often use it loosely to mean the knowledge panel, which is only its visible output.

The Knowledge Graph is the database. A knowledge panel is one rendering of one record in it, shown only sometimes.

A search index stores documents and what they contain. A knowledge graph stores things and what is true of them.

The book's line is that you can state facts but agreement is what promotes them: a claim on your own site is a submission, while the same claim appearing consistently across independent sources is a fact the graph can hold with confidence. Its summary of the whole mechanism is that the graph is not a directory you submit to, it is a jury you convince.

Read about the book's argument.