<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"Google revamped its core product \u2014 search \u2014 in a major way a couple of weeks ago. Now it looks like the change is paying off.\nSince the introduction of its Knowledge Graph on May 16, overall search activity has increased, Google representatives told The Wall Street Journal. \nThe company didn't offer any numbers, but did say people are interacting more with their search results, and performing more searches.\n\nSEE ALSO: Google Search Just Got 1,000 Times Smarter\nOne Google executive, Amit Singhal, said people were doing more with search partly because the new features were \"stoking people's curiosity.\" \nThe Knowledge Graph (more generally known as \"semantic search\") goes beyond matching search terms to pages. In short, it tries to discern the meaning of the phrase a person types in.\nFor example, if I'm searching for \"Facebook movie,\" Google infers I'm probably looking for information about The Social Network. It pulls data from open databases such as Freebase and Wikipedia to create a visual block of results to the right of my search results. Thumbnail images of the cast, and the movie poster, are shown alongside basic info about the movie.\n\nSEE ALSO: How Google Searches the Entire Web in Half a Second [VIDEO]\nSinghal said the increase in use of its product has benefits for others sites as well \u2014 if people are performing more searches, they're visiting more non-Google sites via those links.\nGoogle's Knowledge Graph is only available for U.S.-based searches right now. Since the feature appears to be popular, however, it'll likely spread to other English-language countries soon.\nThe Knowledge Graph and semantic search are tools within the larger trend of evolving search results. Services such as the Wolfram Alpha search engine, interfaces like Apple's Siri and projects like IBM's Watson are all designed to steer people to a small \u2014 or singular \u2014 number of useful results, as opposed to a grab bag of links that may or may not be what you're actually looking for.\nHave you been seeing Google's Knowledge Graph in your search results? Do you think it's affected how often you search? Share your experiences in the comments.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, alija"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/05/30/google-knowledge-graph-search-more/>