Google has been on a never ending quest to bring you better, more accurate and even personal search results over the past 15 years or so, and part of that quest is developing the brains on the back end of the software. No we’re not talking about the tech guys who fix the servers, we’re talking the software engine that powers Google and gives you search results based on a number of factors. Google Now was the first really big step in Google’s plot for world domination and an attempt to understand why and when you do the things you do, and deliver search results to you before you can even ask for them. Because of this Google Now is incredibly useful, but it might become even more useful thanks to Google’s latest project, Knowledge Vault.
If this sounds familiar that’s because the current engine that powers Google Now is called Knowledge Graph, but Knowledge Vault plans on expanding upon the abilities of Knowledge Graph to bring you a near-sentient form of search. This is achieved by the engine being able to go out onto the web and teach itself things, which unlike Google’s current Knowledge Graph doesn’t rely on the community to provide it with information. The short of it is that right now you can ask Google things like “what the weather right now,” or “how old is President Obama?” and it’ll be able to tell you simply because it has gathered bits of facts about a topic and can spit them back at you.
Google’s new project actually aims to form a cohesive set of knowledge about our world and the things that go on in it. So in the future you might be asking things like “how does a rocket propel itself into space?” and Google Now will be able to actually tell you how that works. Right now it’ll just do a Google search if it can’t spit back information, so this sort of jump in tech is monumental to say the least. Will this finally get us to that ever-happy SkyNet future so many have been yearning for? Time will tell, but until next week’s demonstration by Google researcher Kevin Murphy you can check out the slide presentation he’s put together to officially unveil all this new awesome stuff.