True Semantic Search! (Knowledge Graph Objects in Google CSEs)

As I was finishing the "Hacks" slides for my favorite conference, Sourcing Summit Europe, I stumbled across something I hadn't seen before. Google Custom Search Engines (CSEs) got a new setting in the control panel:

We can now select Knowledge Graph Objects to restrict the search! I was intrigued; David Galley and I spent some time researching what the new option does.

We have been taking advantage of including Schema.org objects in CSEs since 2016. (See an example of the technology in this post, and we use it in Social List). The new setting is quite different.

While selecting Schema.org Objects rely on metadata placed there by web page creators, choosing a KG Object does not. Instead, it reflects Google's "idea" of which KG Objects are relevant to the page. Therefore, the new option covers a much wider range of sites that can show up in the results. I say this is a true semantic search in a global search engine!

There is a just-announced API for selecting Knowledge Graph Objects, but there is not much explanation from Google how it works. (It could be quite complicated in the back-end, and is undoubtedly updated continuously.) The best way to examine what happens when we use the setting is to create CSEs and see what shows up in the results. (Get your hands dirty and your mind clear ??).

We can restrict to Schema.org or KG Objects only in Custom Search Engines, but not on Google.com, and it's time for Sourcers to get to apply the technology. It may sound quite technical, but it's not; everyone should able to get KG Object searches going. Please come learn all about the new CSE capacity (and everything else about CSEs) at our webinar on October 15th, 2019.

Here are a couple of details on the KG selection, and four examples.

We can select up to five KG Objects, and the search will look for an OR of the five. However, we can search for an AND of two objects with the use of the CSE refinements.

Examples of CSEs that search for:

1. Females - example search: java developer san francisco
2. Jobs - java developer san francisco
3. Curriculum Vitae - java developer san francisco
4. OSINT - maltego

Check out Become A Custom Search Engines Expert class for an in-depth look at all the options you can set in the CSEs.