As part of the blitz of new announcements from Google this past Monday, Google also introduced what they call the Topic Layer in the Knowledge Graph. With that, they can also dynamically categorize knowledge panels based on sub-categories and topics to better provide search answers to their users.
Google said they have taken their "existing Knowledge Graph - which understands connections between people, places, things and facts about them - and added a new layer, called the Topic Layer, engineered to deeply understand a topic space and how interests can develop over time as familiarity and expertise grow." The Topic Layer is built by analyzing all the content that exists on the web for a given topic and develops hundreds and thousands of subtopics. For these subtopics, we can identify the most relevant articles and videos - the ones that have shown themselves to be evergreen and continually useful, as well as fresh content on the topic, Google said. "We then look at patterns to understand how these subtopics relate to each other, so we can more intelligently surface the type of content you might want to explore next," they added.
Here is how the dynamic organization of the search knowledge panels work now. "Rather than presenting information within a set of predetermined categories," Google said they "can intelligently show the subtopics that are most relevant to what you’re searching for and make it easy to explore information from the web, all with a single search."
Here is an example:
Some are already seeing this in action, such as @MordyOberstein:
Seeing more tabs within Movie Panels. Tabs also seem to vary per movie.
— Mordy Oberstein (@MordyOberstein) September 26, 2018
Big Lebowski panel even gives a showtime at a lone theatre for a movie that came out 20 yrs ago! #SEO #Movies pic.twitter.com/BZgKHCrRgQ
Pretty cool work Google!
A new dynamic way to quickly change results is coming, such as how you can toggle to quickly change about a dog breeds. This is powered by the Topic Layer, a way of leveraging how the Knowledge Graph knows about people, places and things into topics. pic.twitter.com/EgtvKhKS88
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) September 24, 2018
Forum discussion at Twitter.
