Google has been drawing a lot of flak in the past few months for cluttering its search result pages (SERPs) with results from Google+ and also for not being able to provide quality results on the first page of the results which is where the best results should be. Google was never silent and it kept rolling out all kinds of updates and algorithm changes.

If you remember, sometime back I wrote an article on Google’s upcoming search changes which hinted that Google would be providing more information and direct answers on its SERPs. Google has now announced that change officially and it’s called Knowledge Graph.

First things first, the change currently applies to search queries that are about things, people and places, which in Google’s words could be “landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more.” As you see in the screenshot above, Google will try to figure out the exact person, thing or place you want to know about and displays more information about that on its sidebar.

Google will also display summaries on the sidebar that instantly inform about important facts. The suggestions of similar searches are included in the summaries too.

Overall, as the name ‘Knowledge Graph’ suggests, the change intends to present a deeper insight into a search query, other than just presenting the links to other websites which is what Google had been doing all these years. So Google has finally made its move to a ‘knowledge engine’ from a search engine, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. What do you say?