What is the Google Knowledge Graph?

The Google Knowledge Graph is a knowledge base owned by Google and used in various products in services such as Search and Maps. It includes the definitions and facts about movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, authors, locations, companies, medical conditions, and many other types of entities, all available in multiple languages.

History

The Knowledge Graph's predecessor was known as Freebase and was originally developed by Metaweb in 2007.

Freebase, the "graph of everything", was an open and shared database of the world's knowledge. It was open for everyone to edit, like Wikipedia and Wikidata are, and regularly published downloadable database dumps. Its website allowed users to browse topics and collaborate on building the open dataset of all things.

In 2010, Google acquired Metaweb. By that time, Freebase had grown to include 12 million things.

In 2012, Google introduced the Knowledge Graph. It is based on Freebase but is only edited by Google. The Knowledge Graph does not publish database dumps. In 2015 however, the Knowledge Graph Search API was released which opened the way to programmatically query the Knowledge Graph for a subset of data.

In 2016, Freebase was finally shut down. The snapshots of the data stored in Freebase are available for download.

Knowledge Graph today

Knowledge Graph on Google Search

The Knowledge Graph data is regularly displayed on Google Search whenever an entity matching the user's keywords is found:

Knowledge Graph on Google Maps

Places in Google Maps often display supplementary information which comes from the Knowledge Graph:

Exploring the Knowledge Graph with Google Trends

The Google Trends website allows you to browse the topics from the Knowledge Graph.