This morning I woke up to an email from my boss, Sam Michelson.
In it, was the attachment with his knowledge graph result. A while ago we had discussed how strange it was that the “people also search for” suggestions had biblical characters ‘Bilhah’ and ‘Leah’ in there. What struck me this time was how I somehow started showing up there too.
The only reason this is so strange is because I don’t actually have a knowledge graph result show up when you query my name. I always assumed it was because I have a common Jewish name. My name feels like the John Smith of the Jewish world. The best I was ever able to do was an answer box which I got by creating a Freebase entry for myself. But it was never really consistent. And then I made some changes and it vanished.
Here is the super odd part. When I clicked it my name as the suggested search, I actually DO have a knowledge graph result showing up! And it seems like this is the only way to get to it.
I tried to dig into this and here are some thoughts:
- Even though Freebase is read only now, at some point, someone added me in as an employee of Five Blocks which is causing that connection.
- It seems strange to me that Ian Lurie, who has a legitimate knowledge graph appears as a “people also searched for” result along with a Chassidic Rabbi and some random person who happens to share my last name. Why Ian? Why the Rabbis?
- It seems strange that this is the ONLY way to access a knowledge graph for myself. It would seem likely that other queries could trigger this too, but so far I have come up short and only discovered this one.
Who can shed some light on this.
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