“Google’s Knowledge Graph has been the center of much attention lately. We have been hearing a lot about another concept called the Knowledge Vault as well. But just how extensive is Google’s capability? And what about Siri and Bing/Cortana? How do they stack up?” Eric Enge writes for Stone Temple Consulting. “These are the things we set out to measure in this study. To do that, we took 3086 different queries and compared them across all three platforms. These were not random queries. In fact, they were picked because we felt they were likely to trigger a knowledge panel.”
“In addition, this was a straight up knowledge box comparison, not a personal assistant comparison. For purposes of this study, a ‘knowledge box’ or ‘knowledge panel’ is defined as content in the search results that attempts to directly answer a question asked in a search query,” Enge writes. “All queries in this test were done using voice commands, even when using Google and Bing. The reason we did this is that there are many commands in Google and Bing that behave differently when the search query is typed in, and we wanted to do a straight apples to apples comparison.”
“Google Now returns twice as many results as Siri and nearly three times as many results as Cortana,” Enge writes. “This is clear evidence that Google is much further down the path with this type of work than either Apple or Cortana. As noted above, Bing, using text-based search queries, returns knowledge boxes for more types of results than Cortana does at this time.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple clearly has much work to do, but note that iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users can really supercharge their knowledge box results with the free WolframAlpha Viewer which allows users to explore Wolfram|Alpha results from Siri.
A more comprehensive test of knowledge boxes would have graded Siri with the WolframAlpha Viewer installed which would have significantly improved Siri’s results.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Edward W.” for the heads up.]