Hinted at for months, Google formally launched its “Knowledge Graph” today. The new technology is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results. It also allows Google to move toward a new way of searching not for pages that match query terms but for “entities” or concepts that the words describe.

Knowledge Graph? “Graph” is a technical term used to describe how a set of objects are connected. Google has used a “link graph” to model how pages link to each other, in order to help determine which are popular and relevant for particular searches. Facebook has used a “social graph” understand how people are connected. “Knowledge Graph” is Google’s term for how it is building relationships between different people, places and things and report facts about these entities.