At Google, when you asked a question, you could sometimes get a response providing answers to questions such as:
“When was George W. Bush’s birth-date?”.
We knew that Google could answer some questions like that, even if it might have been challenging, but we didn’t have much of a clue regarding the existence of something like Google’s Knowledge Graph until 2011. So the answers we would see would sometimes be regular snippets where a word such as “birth-date” might be bolded.
Our set of 17 “related patents” that I first saw mentioned in a patent I wrote about this past Tuesday, and which was granted on August 19th, appear to have been created by a team under Andrew Hogue who was tasked to create “an annotation framework” to index more objects and facts associated with them on the web, which he would discuss more deeply during the presentation The Structured Search Engine, which is highly recommended.
He also oversaw the acquisition of MetaWeb by Google and the introduction of 25 former Meta-Web staff members from the company into Google.
