Entity Based Search and Experiences

Evan Fishkin had just joined Microsoft's MSN team before the festival, and in this 2013 talk he covers entities in search. Google's Knowledge Graph, instant answers and rich snippets, Google Now and the Search Charm in Windows 8 all show users facts directly. Evan explains what an entity is, where search engines get their facts, and why it pays to give them structured data even though users may then see the answer right in the results.

You'll learn which entity types actually show up in results, why rich snippets lift click-through rates by 20–30 % without a change in position, according to Evan, and how to start with structured markup. Evan covers planning it with developers and what Apache UIMA is for, and shows free Google tools that let you test the effect without any investment.