Google is continually tweaking its search engine to make getting information just that little bit easier. The latest addition to the far-reaching Knowledge Graph system appears to be additional inline information that will show up beneath some broad search results. Search for a historical figure or something relating to geography, and you'll see basic facts beneath the entry. The new feature was spotted by the Google Operating System blog, and it appears to be limited to Wikipedia results for the time being.

The additional snippets of information seem to be bite-sized versions of the full Knowledge Graph display, shown to users when the search engine isn't sure that they're looking for one particular thing. For example, when searching for "john f kennedy," the new tool will show Kennedy's vice president, party, and years of military service - not exactly the first things you want to know when searching for JFK. But if you accept Google's search suggestion for "president john f kennedy" (a small link to the left on the web), you'll get the results with his full mini-bio included, including the fact that he was the 35th president, birth and death dates, and a short text blurb. There's also some inconsistency here: on the Android version of Chrome, I get the mini-bio for both search terms.

At the moment these little inline factoids aren't all that useful, and the search engine seems to be applying them somewhat randomly. It doesn't help that the formatting more or less blends in with the search results, so you have to be looking at the bottom of each entry on the off chance that they might be there. We might see inline facts get expanded, or this could just be a Knowledge Graph tweak in the intermediate stage. Keep an eye out.

Source: Google Operating System