Google’s New Knowledge Graph Could Threaten Wikipedia

Think of the Knowledge Graph as Amazon’s “Products You Might Also Like,” only for everything on the web.

This could be pretty darn useful, and a credible threat to Wikipedia.  Right now, if I want to learn broadly about a topic, I find my way to an appropriate Wikipedia page, then find more information, and then go back and Google that new topic.  Rinse and repeat.

Google’s Knowledge Graph might take the Wikipedia step out of the equation by surfacing relevant additional information within the new Search pane.  

To be clear, the Knowledge Graph needs to pull its information from somewhere, and that somewhere will often be Wikipedia.  So the threat is to Wikipedia’s traffic and not to its relevancy.

Of course, this all comes down to execution.  They need to surface the correct data and design it so it’s more efficient and not distracting.  

It’s easy to predict that someone searching for a camera might also want a memory card, but that someone searching for a Liger might want to read about Tippi Hedren?  That’s tricky.

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