Adding realtime coverage to the Google knowledge graph

In May 2012, the Web search engine Google has introduced the so-called Knowledge Graph, a graph that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another. Entities covered by the Knowledge Graph include landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, movies, celestial objects, works of art, and more. The graph enhances Google search in three main ways: by disambiguation of search queries, by search log-based summarization of key facts, and by explorative search suggestions. With this paper, we suggest a fourth way of enhancing Web search: through the addition of realtime coverage of what people say about real-world entities on social networks. We report on a browser extension that seamlessly adds relevant microposts from the social networking sites Google+, Facebook, and Twitter in form of a panel to Knowledge Graph entities. In a true Linked Data fashion, we interlink detected concepts in microposts with Freebase entities, and evaluate our approach for both relevancy and usefulness. The extension is freely available, we invite the reader to reconstruct the examples of this paper to see how realtime opinions may have changed since time of writing.