Google is expanding the Knowledge Graph into more languages, including Italian, French, Japanese, and Russian.
According to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, Google Fellow Ben Gomes made the announcement on stage at LeWeb Paris. There is a blog post about it on Google’s Italy blog (in Italian).
There’s no mention in the post, however, about all the new languages, and Lardinois says there could be more. We’ve reached out to Google for a full list, and will update accordingly.
Update: Google has put out a post on its Inside Search blog saying that it’s rolling out in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.
Google Search Senior Product Manager Aaron Brown writes:
So in Japanese, your search for [白鵬] will bring up the top-ranked sumo wrestler, including his heya and ranks, and help you discover other highly-ranked sumo wrestlers. Or a Russian search for [петр I] will help you research the country’s historic Tzar Peter the Great, and explore connections to his family and other famous rulers. And if you’re a fan of football in Brazil, [corinthians] will show information including that team’s most recent championship wins — all in your language.
This is more than just translation. The Knowledge Graph needs to account for different meanings of the same word — “football” means something quite different in the U.S. than in Europe. It also needs to recognize what’s most important in a particular region. The graph now covers 570 million entities, 18 billion facts and connections, and about three times as many queries globally as when we first launched it — we’ll keep working on making it more useful for you.
Last week, Google announced some content expansion of the Knowledge Graph in the U.S. It now includes information about drugs.
Google has placed a great deal of emphasis on the Knowledge Graph offering since it initially launched earlier this year. It is even the subject of an ad campaign Google launched last month, for its mobile search app.
Google is likely only getting started in terms of all the information that Knowledge Graph will surface. It will be interesting to see how much it has expanded by this time next year, and in how many countries it is available.
