How does Google decide which images to show for the Knowledge Panels shown for known entities in search? A new patent granted to the search giant explains how.
Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea was once again the first to notice the filing of the patent granted to Google, which is titled ‘Scoring images related to entities’. The patent describes how Google’s algorithms identify high authority images to represent the entity being searched.
If I understand the patent correctly, here is how’s Google’s image selection process works:
- Images representing the entity being searched are identified
- A quality score is obtained for the pages containing the images identified in step 1
- An “image resource” quality score is assigned to the images based on the quality score of the pages featuring the image
- A set of similar images is generated for each image
- An image score is generated for each image based on the image resource score generated in step 3
- The image score generated in step 5, and the image resource score generated in step 3, are then used to generate an “image authority” score
The images representing the entity that end up having the highest image authority score are the ones chosen for Knowledge Panels.
It’s not only interesting to learn how Google chooses images for Knowledge Panels, but it’s interesting to learn how Google determines the authority score of an image.
In summary, the authority of an image is based on a score assigned to the image which is derived from the quality score of the pages containing the image.
Editorial Credit: rvlsoft / Shutterstock.com
