Google announced its “knowledge graph” today and describes it as “an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a ‘graph’ — that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings. … It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.” Information from the knowledge graph will initially augment search results — the feature is already being rolled out to US English users. A short video explains more.

A CNET article quotes KG project manager Jack Menzel: Menzel pitches Knowledge Graph without using the word “semantic” even once. While he says, “I dream of the semantic Web,” he takes pains to point out that what Google is announcing today is not what people talk about when they discuss semantic Web concepts. “We do continue to work on how to make search semantic,” he says, “but talking about it brings out the crazy people.” I hope this did not come out the way he intended it to.