Google’s Knowledge Graph is a “massive graph of real-world things and their connections to bring more meaningful results.” In essence the graph search enhances the search engine results with semantic and conversational search information to provide meaningful results for the searcher. Knowledge Graph has been designed to answer users’ queries without a need to go to some websites for answers. It also helps discover existence of certain things and summarise relevant facts about those things. It helps us to do sightseeing (when showing interesting places to see displayed as a carousel, below our query) :


or plan our free time (e.g. live cinema listing):


Or get quick flight info:


Altogether there are around 16 different types of Google Knowledge Graph

As with lots of aspects of Google, there are no sure-fire ways to appear in Google’s Knowledge Graph. However, there are several ways we can help influence its chances of doing so.

How Google determines the entities for people, places and things?

1. It looks like Google pulls out the information from Freebase - a huge community curated structured database of well-known people, places and things.

On March 3, 2007, Metaweb publicly announced Freebase, described by the company as "an open shared database of the world's knowledge," and "a massive, collaboratively edited database of cross-linked data." [Wikipedia].

It contains around 40 million entities and 1 billion facts and it is still growing. So check out if your company has been listed there and if not makes sure you will get there soon.

2.Secondly make sure your website uses schema mark up in order to improve the displayed search results. You can mark up creative work, events, organisations, people, places, products or properties. Use mark-up helper if you need assistance. Test your mark-up in Google Testing Tool.

Schema allows Google to link data into linked graphs of structured data, understand them better and display some of them in SERPs.

In order to further reassure Google your identity can always utilise ‘sameAs’ property this can be used for both people and organisations. ‘SameAs’ has been proposed to improve and clarify schame.org handling identity issues where many various websites provided information about the same real world entity.

To avoid identity issues simply place ’sameAs’ property on your website referencing another place stating your identity (Freebase, Wikipedia, Google+ etc.)

3. Make sure you use Google+ which has been associated with you ( when placing rel=’author’ on your blog) or your company (when placing rel=’publisher’ on your company website) to allow Google to see yet another way of self-identification. You will need Google+ in order to sign up at Freebase anyway.

4. Have informative Wikipedia entry about your company to aid all the above described entries and make Google recognise you as a trustworthy entity. 

 * Many thanks to +Krystian Szastok and +Andrew Isidoro for giving me inspiration when writing this post.