The brain behind Google Knowledge Graph

Behind every major consumer product is a story. Take Google's new search engine, Knowledge Graph.

The Wikipedia-like search doesn't simply match keywords, but attempts to understand the query, and present deeper results on the right-hand-side of the screen. Google says it is a "critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the Web and understands the world a bit more like people do."

A search of "Kings" on Knowledge Graph, for example, will yield the NHL's Los Angeles Kings, NBA's Sacramento Kings and the NBC series called Kings.

Knowledge Graph is the culmination of a 15-year vision by John ("JG") Giannandrea, who envisioned a virtual catalog of "everything in the world." He co-founded Metaweb in 2005, and sold it to Google for an undisclosed price in 2010. It was at the Plex that he yoked his project with Google's search engine and came up with Knowledge Graph.

"Trying to understand all the world's information, catalog all the human knowledge," says the 47-year-old Giannandrea, who had a germ of an audacious idea while at Netscape in 1997. "The challenge was making it rich and intelligent. By tying our concept into (Google) search, we did it."

When he joined Google in 2010, Giannandrea's Metaweb started with 12 million entities. Today, it has more than 500 million entities, and more than 3.5 billion connections -- all visible via Google Search.

"After Google, we realized we could do this on scale," he says.

Fifteen years later, the vision is on full display for millions of Google users, in the form of more comprehensive search results.