Tiziano Ferro Knowledge Graph Search Result including event rich snippet and Google+ data! Click to enlarge.
I just finished documenting Google’s new display of fact boxes in selected search results, enabled through Google’s use of what it calls a knowledge graph, as preparation for the next edition of my SEO Course (June 13 & 14). I thought I’d share a few of the salient points communicators probably should know:
- Google fact boxes, created from their knowledge graph, are limited to selected searches conducted in English on Google.com. I put in English in italics as query terms are often ambiguous. The term marketing, along with variants like web marketing have entered many languages, including my adopted Italian. Other terms, such as names, e.g. Tiziano Ferro, do not explicitly indicate the user’s search language.
- Knowledge boxes currently only appear for users signed in to a Google service, although I didn’t find a mention of this as a requirement in Google’s documentation. With the exception of the display of private Google+ posts, it isn’t clear why a user should be signed in to see fact boxes.
- Marketers are going to be disappointed to know that knowledge graph panels won’t be appear for companies, video games and cars – each of which implies a strong commercial intention on the part of the searcher. Google does say fact boxes may appear for books, movies, sports teams, locations, dog breeds, roller coasters or famous people.
- Google says the data is being pulled from Wikipedia, the World Bank, Weather Underground, Freebase, the CIA World Factbook and other sources on the web. I’ve seen posts from Google+ show up and I would imagine that any of the public data Google knows about is a likely candidate for inclusion, as is data exposed with Schema.org semantic web markup. Want to ensure your data is eligible for display in knowledge panels? Make sure you expose your data to Google!
For further information on Google’s knowledge graph, see Danny Sullivan’s SearchEngineLand review and Google’s official announcement. There’s also a presentation video:
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