Google's Knowledge Graph tripled in size in seven months

Since it unveiled the Knowledge Graph in May, Google said the next-generation search product would grow fast. Today we learned just how fast.

At launch, the Knowledge Graph was a database of the relationships among 500 million objects, and contained 3.5 billion facts. Less than seven months later, the graph covers 570 million entities and 18 billion facts -- as well as three times as many queries as it did when it started.

Whenever the Knowledge Graph recognizes a query it understands, the results show up in a box on the right-hand side of the page. The fact boxes resemble Wikipedia entries, and draw from a variety of publicly available and licensed data sources.

The graph launched with facts about categories including sports teams; actors, directors, and movies; art works and museums; cities and countries; music albums and recording artists; planets and spacecraft; and roller coasters. Since then it has added several new categories -- including the whimsical Bacon Number search and last week's announcement of pharmaceutical searching.

Until now, the Knowledge Graph was available only in English. But starting today, the Knowledge Graph is now available to a much wider audience.

The company said the feature is now available in seven new languages. Over the next few days, users will find it available in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

This means that users will find their queries are better localized to their language and the country in which the search originated. "If you're a fan of football in Brazil, [corinthians] will show information including that team's most recent championship wins -- all in your language," Google said in a blog post.

With every addition to the Knowledge Graph, Google comes a bit closer to the "Star Trek" computer that they say inspired it. The company still has a long way to go -- but as today's numbers show, it's growing quickly.