Today, Google unveiled the Google Knowledge Graph, an enhancement to the search engine that gives it the brains to tell the differences and relationships between places, people and things – to use Google’s own example, the difference between Taj Mahal, the famous landmark, and Taj Mahal, the musician. As Google Senior VP of Engineering Amit Singhal put it in a blog entry, Knowledge Graph is about searching for “things, not strings.”

Understanding that kind of ambiguity is powerful enough, but Google’s also leveraging Knowledge Graph to give users better summaries of their search terms: Again using Google’s example, a search for Marie Curie will return a brief overview of her life and times rather than just the dates she lived. It also draws connections between a searched term and other, related people, places and, well, things.

This may sound like a big data solution to you, and you’d be right. Singhal writes that Knowledge Graph uses 500 million data objects and 3.5 billion facts and relationships,  with most of that information drawn from publicly-available sources like Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. Of course, Google being Google, Singhal promises that the search giant will fine-tune it based on what people search for, and whatever other data it can scrape from the web. And just like with an enterprise big data solution, Google is hoping that end users can draw useful insights from the data it correlates.

Google’s doing a phased rollout of Knowledge Graph results, and it may take some time before you see the new features. Once you get it, though, you’ll be able to click between different interpretations of your search string in the lower left-hand corner.

This is a good example of how Google’s flexible architecture enables it to add new, more cutting-edge technologies to its cloud without having to reinvent the wheel. At a time when “continuous deployment” is the watchword in the DevOps space, and service providers look to integrate big data as business value adds, Google’s managed to do both in an impressive display of service flexibility. Google’s overall cloud strategy may still be in considerable question, but the strength of its technology shouldn’t be.

On a similar note, yesterday, Google launched a Research Pane for Google Docs which enables inline web searches, with data drawn from the Google ecosystem, and the ability to include said data directly in the document with footnotes. For Google, it’s about convergence – convergence of your data and its data, as per its recent privacy policy shift, for better or for worse.