I’m surprised the blog-o-sphere hasn’t been all over this but yesterday Google USA launched a new change to their user interface, this time called Google Knowledge Graph. What this does is provide answers from ‘trusted sources’ inline with your search queries. To achieve this, they’ve developed a new algorithm that puts the words in your search into into context. This is pretty revolutionary stuff and certainly has a knock on effect when it comes to our thinking about how this could apply to on-page text. Other implications of this is how it will affect Q&A style website content which i know is favored by many SEO professionals as a way of mopping up long tail traffic for our clients.

To date, there is no information on what sites they’re using as trusted sources for this information but you can bet that once its more widely available this is going to form the first goal of the industry as we seek to influence the influencers.

It’s also interesting that Matt Cutts already hinted that this was going to be rolled out and I personally had fears that Google was seeking to turn into an answers engine that displayed scraped content instead of providing website listings based on their need to add semantics and microformats to content (Google Shopping changes too). I’m sure this will come in time and we’ll all either love it or hate it and move back to Bing (which also showcased the same technology when it was being conceived). Also that Google+ isnt integrated apart from people searches.

As mentioned previously Google Knowledge Graph is USA only for now.

Note: I intended to attach an image but for some reason that doesn’t work today???