WWW Google, How Do you Know Everything

For website owners and marketers, the Google Knowledge Graph represents a significant opportunity. It’s vital to optimize your website and its content to increase its chances of being recognized and included in the Knowledge Graph. There are several ways to achieve this, such as using structured data markup (Schema.org), maintaining an active Google My Business profile, and ensuring your website is linked to authoritative websites.

Me and my data: how much do the internet giants really know?

To briefly state the obvious, the internet giants are seriously big: Google is not only the world’s largest search engine, it’s one of the top three email providers, a social network, and owner of the Blogger platform and the world’s largest video site, YouTube. Facebook has the social contacts, messages, wallposts and photos of more than 750 million people.

Given that such information could be used to sell us stuff, accessed by government or law enforcement bodies (perhaps without warrants, under legal changes), or – theoretically, at least – picked up by hackers or others, it’s not unreasonable to wonder exactly how much the internet giants know about us.

US users of the sites are out of luck: there’s no legal right under US law to ask a company to hand over all the information it holds on you. Users do have some say in how much companies are allowed to take, usually contained in the terms of service. But EU citizens are in a better position – under Europe-wide data protection rules, anyone can send a written request for their full data and, for a small fee, the company has to ship it out, usually within 40 days.

It’s a great chance to see exactly how much Google and Facebook really know about us, and all we need is a test subject. Perhaps an EU citizen who’s been on Facebook since it came to the UK in 2005; who’s had a YouTube account almost as long; and was on Gmail back when invitations to the service were something to beg, borrow and steal, rather than a nuisance. They’d also have to be enough of an idiot to write about what they dig up in public. This left one obvious, unlucky test case in the Guardian offices: me.

Things didn’t get off to a great start with Google. The company has a main US branch, Google Inc, and subsidiaries within other countries. In the UK, that’s Google UK Ltd. Here’s the catch: Google UK Ltd, which is subject to the EU rules that let you access your data, doesn’t hold it. As Google says in a statement: “Please note that Google UK Ltd does not process any personal data in relation to Google services, which are provided by Google Inc, a US-incorporated company whose address you can find in the Google privacy policy.”

While we can find Google Inc’s address, that doesn’t necessarily help: a spokeswoman for the UK regulator, the ICO, confirmed that EU laws on subject access requests do not extend to the US parent company. This means there’s no real chance of getting hold of user data from Google through this route.

Thankfully, Google isn’t totally unhelpful. It has two tools that help show the information it holds on you, which a helpful staffer walked me through. The first, Google Dashboard, has run for about three years and gathers information from almost all of Google’s services in one place. Another feature, the “account activity report”, has launched recently, and shows Google’s information on my logins in the past month, including countries, browsers, platforms and how much I’ve used the services.

Running these tools on my work email account (the Guardian’s emails are managed by Google) is disconcerting, but not too much so. The dashboard can see I’m a member of a few internal Google groups, and have a blogger account used to collaborate with some researchers on Twitter riot data.

Data showing my work gmail account has 877 contacts – and listing them – gives me some pause for thought, as does a list of the 398 Google docs I’ve opened. The site also lists my most recent sent and received emails (in both cases a “no subject” conversation thread with a colleague).

A little more disconcerting is a chat history logging 500 conversations with 177 colleagues. Google chat is a handy way to collaborate in a large building, especially one full of journalists who seem to prefer to talk online (as Twitter activity testifies) rather than in the flesh. But there’s more than a little gossip going on too. I make a mental note to check how to delete those logs.

The big relief comes when I note Google isn’t tracking the internet searches I’ve made on my work account, which for journalists the world over tends towards the incredibly odd.

Repeating this exercise for my personal Google+ account is less relaxing. There are several bits of extra info here. The most innocuous is a heavily neglected Google+ profile with a few hundred connections but almost no posts.

Slightly more embarrassing is a seemingly connected YouTube account, apparently set up at a time when I thought using character names from role-playing games was a good account-naming policy. It has only one surviving video – a student interview with Heather Brooke – but does link to my viewing history, which includes the Tottenham riots, Dire Straits, Pomplamoose and, bafflingly, a Q&A from the Ryan commission into child abuse in Ireland.

Worst of all is a lengthy list of my search results. Looking through anyone’s list of searches gives a distressing degree of insight into odder parts of their personality. Google helpfully lists my most recent searches across its different services on one page. For web search: “paul daniels wiki”. For images: “harry styles” (explainer: I was trying to see who he was, after my 15-year-old niece mentioned him).

News was “youtube user figures”, showing I am meticulous in my research, while even my maps search history is present – last result “Portland House, SW1”. Mortifyingly, my last blogs search was a vanity one: “james ball”. Google also holds information on my login IPs, and other anonymised non-logged-in data, but doesn’t (yet) make this available.

There was some relief from the gloom though. Google insists the tracking for its display adverts – it is the market leader in online advertising – doesn’t draw from user data, but comes instead from cookies, files that anonymously monitor the sites you visit. Google’s ad preference page believes I am interested in online video, TV reality shows, printers, Egypt, politics and England. From this, it has concluded I am likely to be over 65 and male. I find myself more reassured than offended that Google has got this more or less wrong.

Facebook is a much trickier prospect. Unlike Google, Facebook actually processes some data in the EU, through its Irish branch, making it subject to access laws. These are currently taking a long time – apparently up to three months – due to a large volume of requests from campaigners, so I once again resorted to the site’s own tools.

Facebook’s main download tool was familiar, if slightly embarrassing. A downloaded archive that opens into something looking oddly like a stripped-down, uncluttered Facebook, this lists all my friends, every post ever made on my wall, by myself or others (some dating back almost seven years are not comfortable viewing), my private messages and the small number (fewer than 10) of photos I’ve uploaded to the site myself.

The Facebook extended archive is a little creepier, including “poke info”, each instance of tracking cookies they possess, previous names, and full login and logout info. Every event to which I’ve ever been invited is neatly listed, alongside its location, time, and whether I said I would attend .

One piece of information – a supposed engagement to a schoolfriend, Amy Holmes – stands out. A Facebook “joke” that seemed faintly funny for about a week several years ago was undone by hiding it from any and all Facebook users, friends or otherwise (to avoid an “… is now single!” status update). The forgotten relationship helpfully explains why Facebook has served me up with badly targeted bridalwear adverts for several years, and reassures me that Facebook doesn’t know quite everything.

Or does it? There are gaping holes in what Facebook has made available to me. No posts from other users in which I’m mentioned are included, not even from my friends. None of the 300+ photographs in which I feature, uploaded by friends and family, are there. On the upside, this means I escape yet another viewing of the naked baby photos my ruthless older sister decided to share with the world. On the downside, it reminds me that huge swaths of my information on these networks are outside my control.

Campaigners estimate that only around 29% of the information Facebook possesses on any given user is accessible through the site’s tools.

The tour through a decent swath of my personal data is at once disturbing and comforting. Disturbing because it reminds me mine is a life lived online. Among the huge tranche of information available to Google and Facebook alone is virtually everyone I know, a huge amount of what I’ve said to (and about) them, and a vast amount of data on where I’ve been. Such detailed tracking would have been an impossibility even 10 years ago, and we’re largely clueless as to its effects.

This is the core of the main comfort: despite their mountain of data, Google and Facebook seem largely clueless, too – they’ve had no more luck making any sense out of it than I have. And that, for now, is a relief.

WWW Google, How Do you Know Everything

“WWW Google” it’s just a joke guys. Google knows almost everything in this world. Whether you type how to signup for Gmail or how to brew a coffee, Google has the answer. How is this even possible? How Google became such a huge index of things within the 2 decades after its invention? If you are curious to know the answers to all these questions, continue reading this article where we are going to completely analyze the search engine giant – Google.

www.google.com is a very familiar site to the internet users. If you have a smartphone or a PC with an internet connection, most likely you might have visited the website at least once. The interesting search features we listed in our last article on Google Review will make your searches easier like never before. But actually, how do they provide such precise information for almost all of the user’s search queries? Let’s dig deeper.

WWW Google, How did you get all this Info?

In order to provide the info that the users need, Google has to get it from somewhere. It is almost impossible to write all those content by assessing them to the employees. So, Google should collect them from anywhere else. That’s why the Internet or the web is a collection of millions of websites created by thousands of brilliant minds. Google is just a mediator between the user and the website where the actual information resides.

They have something called the “crawler” which is often referred to as the “Google spider” or “Google Bot.” It is actually a system that crawls the web pages which are on the internet and allowed access to the crawlers and bots. When compared with other search engine crawlers, Google has an absolutely advanced system that fetches data from millions of web pages at the same time. So, it is not just a single crawler that helps Google to build its index.

The crawled web pages will be run through several mechanisms created by Google. They will also store the information on their servers for accessing them later. So, whenever a website publishes a new article about anything in this world, Google has the data. For example, if I write an article on “how to change or reset Gmail password,” Google has the web page URL in its index. So, this is how the WWW Google guy knows almost everything in the world.

How are you Providing it to the users?

Google has an index of all the web pages which the web crawler has crawled. So, it is time to provide the users with the required answers to their questions. So, whenever a user inputs a search query, Google has an extremely fast mechanism that scans all of the indexed pages related to that term (which is already sorted out according to the SEO rules) and lists the most appropriate ones. All these happen within a matter of milliseconds. The extremely capable Google servers can show millions of results to users to solve their problems.

To experiment with it yourself, just search something on Google search, and you will see something like “About 6,550,000,000 results (0.92 seconds).” It is not a joke like WWW Google. It is a real fact. When I searched the term “music” in Google, they provided more than 6 Billion results for me to select. Here is the screenshot.

Are they Precise?

Yes, they are. Google has one of the best systems to sort out the most relevant results for the user’s search queries. They automatically remove spammy websites or websites created for exploiting the users. For almost 99% of the searches, Google will provide the exact answers you are looking for. The incorrect results may show up if the search query is very rare and no one wrote about it. If a spammy site wrote about that search term and no one else even hasn’t included that keyword anywhere on their web pages, that website may rank.

If you search for something which is either misspelled or not recognized by Google, it will suggest the right search term for you. It will look like this.

If you entered something really weird that Google can’t find in any of the indexed pages in its database, it would show you the not found error looks like this.

In short, Google shows accurate results for all of the user search queries using the most advanced ranking techniques. As per the industry experts, there are around 200+ different ranking factors that Google uses to filter out the best results among thousands of related pages. So, never again doubt Google. They are pretty much experienced to provide you with the answer precisely to any of your questions even if it is complicated.

Google Knowledge Graph

Google has always been about finding the most relevant and comprehensive set of results for each query. However, Google’s Knowledge Graph takes search queries a step further. Launched in 2012, the Knowledge Graph is Google’s semantic-search knowledge base. It aims to understand the meanings and connections between things, not just strings of characters and words.

What Is Google Knowledge Graph?

Google Knowledge Graph is a system that uses machine learning to pull together various pieces of information from different sources to provide a more holistic answer to a search query. Essentially, it’s an advanced version of search, where Google tries to understand real-world entities and their relationships to one another.

For instance, when you search for a famous person like “Bill Gates”, Google will provide a box on the right side of the search results containing quick facts about him such as his birthdate, educational background, and notable achievements.

Advantages of the Knowledge Graph

Google’s Knowledge Graph has a couple of significant advantages:

1. Quick Answers: It provides quick, at-a-glance answers to users’ queries. For example, if you ask “Who is the president of the United States,” Google will provide the answer directly on the search results page, without you having to click on a link.
2. Contextual Understanding: The Knowledge Graph helps Google understand the context behind a search query, providing more accurate results. For example, if you search for “jaguar,” Google can now determine whether you’re referring to the animal, the car brand, or the Jacksonville Jaguars football team based on other keywords included in your search.
3. Increased Engagement: By providing quick answers and visually rich search results, the Knowledge Graph improves user engagement. It enhances the user experience by providing information directly and minimizing the need to sift through multiple websites.

How to Utilize Google Knowledge Graph

For website owners and marketers, the Google Knowledge Graph represents a significant opportunity. It’s vital to optimize your website and its content to increase its chances of being recognized and included in the Knowledge Graph. There are several ways to achieve this, such as using structured data markup (Schema.org), maintaining an active Google My Business profile, and ensuring your website is linked to authoritative websites.

Google’s Knowledge Graph stands as a prime example among the numerous groundbreaking features that Google has created throughout the years. It serves as a testament to their dedication to organizing the vast

How much is your Capacity?

When it comes to Google, considering its huge network of servers and rapid growth in earnings, there is nothing like an out-of-storage issue or server outage. They store the same data in multiple servers placed all over the globe in order to protect the internet always info-rich.

Even if a server got some serious issues, the other servers would do the job for the users. In addition, they are keeping their systems all up to date with the most advanced technologies possible. As per the reports from trusted sources, Google has crafted its own method of creating and maintaining the servers with the coding languages prepared by its own team members. So, any external change will not affect their process unless they decide.

If you still doubt the power of Google servers to maintain Billions of search queries each day, just think about YouTube, where 300+ hours of video are being uploaded each and every minute. It is just a single service provided by Google. So, they are capable of serving the users even if the internet users doubled overnight (I believe so).

So, the WWW Google search engine is enough powerful and intelligent to collect, store, and provide all the information in the world (If it is anywhere on the internet.) It has been helping internet users since Google’s birthday. Now you understood everything about it.