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SearchReSearch

Delays… and Knowledge Panels

Dan Russell • December 14, 2016
 SearchReSearch
Republished with permission from SearchReSearch
Delays… and Knowledge Panels Dan Russell
Life sometimes intervenes.

Sigh.

This week's answer is a bit delayed because I'm living with a bit of sinusitis, which is basically an infection of the sinuses (which has the side-effect of making it tough to think through the writing process).

Naturally, I did the query for:

[ sinusitis ]

and found the following Knowledge Panel on the right side of the SERP. (Remember that you can click on this image to see the full-size pic.)



You see a Knowledge Panel (KP) whenever Google has a collection of high-quality information on that topic. Notice where I've added the red arrows. People often miss the symptoms and treatments tabs in the KP (near the top).

People also often miss the downloadable PDF (see the lower red arrow). That's a summary that shows all of the information on one handy sheet.

And from that I see that I can expect the sinusitis problem to be "Short-term: resolves within days to weeks."

KPs are also created when the query refers to a well-known entity that's a part of the Knowledge Graph (KG). If you do a query that ends up returning a well-known person, place, or thing, you might well see a KP on that topic with facts that are linked to the entity (with high confidence). For instance, you could do a search for a well-known person like this:

[ Charles Ranlett Flint ]


As with the medical KP, there are other elements of the KP that are worth noticing. For instance, all of the field names--like Born: Died: Education: are also clickable, and will do a query about that exact topic (e.g., [ Charles Ranlett Flint born ] which will tell you when he was born).

The blue links--e.g., Thomaston, ME or Washington, D.C. are clickable as well, allowing you to follow your lateral thinking ideas as you like.

I'll answer last week's Challenge by the end of this week. I hope I'll be feeling better by then... and able to think properly.

We'll be back on our usual schedule by next week.

Search on!

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About the Author

Dan RussellDan Russell

I study the way people search and research. I guess that makes me an anthropologist of search. While I work at Google, my blog and G+ posts reflects my own thoughts and not those of my employer. I am FIA's Future-ist in Residence. More »

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