Google (News - Alert) has released its Knowledge Graph, a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they’re connected to one another. The words you search can often have more than one meaning. With the Knowledge Graph, Google can understand the difference and help you narrow your results to find just the answers you’re looking for.

When you search for things, people, or places that Google knows about, the Knowledge Graph will enhance the search results. Promoted with the tagline, “Things not strings,” the idea of the Knowledge Graph is to give users real answers and not just links. It’s about making real world connections and collecting information about objects in the real world. By understanding the relationship between things, Google can do a better job at understanding what exactly you’re searching for.

This is a first step toward building the next generation of search. In the words of Google, moving from, “an information engine to a knowledge engine.”

Using a link graph, Google will see how pages link to each other and then choose the popular and relevant links for the search query. No matter what the search term is, people will get knowledgeable links of information that’s relevant.

The Knowledge Graph currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts and relationships between these different objects. It works in three steps; relevant results, topical summary, and deeper discoveries.

For example, Google knows that a search for Dallas can either be for the city in Texas or the TV series. It will now allow you to narrow your search results for the one you were actually searching for. The next step will have Google use its data to know what facts people need for a certain query, and then it will summarize relevant content around that topic. So, if you were in fact searching for the city of Dallas, TX, your topical summary will include information like the population size and a Google map.

The deeper discoveries step is when other people’s previous searches come into play. That’s when you might find relevant information that you may not have thought to search for yourself or wouldn’t have stumbled upon on your own.

Features of the Knowledge Graph include a panel that will be displayed next to the Web results. Google can jump start your research process by using information people may have already searched for related to your search term.

The Knowledge Graph will also be available on smartphones and tablets. Other features Google recently released include the related search previews, search by image, voice search, flight search, Google Instant and personal results features.