Google Dropped Wikipedia Reference in NLP API Demo

Google has dropped reporting Wikipedia matches in the desktop output of its Natural Language Programming API. But never fear… the data is still in the API output itself, and you can see it easily (without resorting to programming) in our Entity Analyzer tool, which is free. If you play with Entities in SEO, this post tells you what changed and why this is important.

The blue box above is Google’s free browser-based demo of its NLP API. Putting a bunch of text in there shows the output of all the underlying ideas within the content. However, it used to show Wikipedia URLs in the output, and these have now been dropped from the desktop demo but not dropped from the API itself.

Is the Google NLP tool still an Entity Checker now?

Well. No. Not the browser-based demo, anyway.

When Google showed Wikipedia URLs for topics, we could distinguish between where Google reports an entity and when Google uses some NLP parsing to guess (at a page level) the type of entity that something might be. In the above image, saying that “2023” is a number is correct but misleading. It is probably (in this case) meant to be a date (or, more specifically, a year). Still, if Google genuinely wanted to show the underlying entity in this example, it might previously have helped by referencing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023, which is Wikipedia’s “page of authority” for the year 2023.

In the actual API that Google provides, Google still returns Wikipedia URLs where it finds a good match for a concept.

So, how do you check what entities Google reports on a page of text?

InLinks is a much more aggressive Entity extractor than Google. In other words, InLinks is always likely to extract AS MANY entities as possible from a page. It does this so that an SEO can decide which entities to make more prominent. The Entity Analyzer tool puts “green dots” where Google reports Wikipedia URLs and red dots where we find entities (with Wikipedia URLs) that Google’s API does NOT report.

How to Use the InLinks/Google Entity Analyzer

Option 1: You can use the Entity Indexing Analyzer three times a day without logging in to InLinks at the moment.

Option 2: Get a FREE Inlinks account and then you can access the tool and much more from the dashboard (no card required).

Option 3: Paid accounts start at $49 a month and can be cancelled any time. Have a look at the full suite of entity SEO tools and pricing options. (Or just get your card out here, with our thanks.)