Earlier this month, Google shared a fascinating statistic. The number of items in the company's Knowledge Graph -- its database of people, places, and things, and the connections between them -- had tripled in size over its first seven months in the wild, to 18 billion facts.

Up until this month, though, those facts were available only in English. It wasn't until December 4 that Google made the Knowledge Graph truly global, by introducing it in seven new languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian, and Italian.

The project to make Knowledge Graph content available in … Read more

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is looking at buying Summly, an app created by boy genius Nick D'Aloisio to summarize news articles, according to a report from All Things D.

Mayer met with the teenage D'Aloisio in recent weeks, unnamed sources told All Things D. The app uses an algorithm to pull out relevant information from news articles and turns them into neat paragraphs that fit on an iPhone screen, while also linking to the full article.

CNET has contacted both Yahoo and Summly for comment, and we'll update if we hear back.

Summly would be an attractive … Read more

Google has settled a long-running dispute with Belgian newspaper publishers that accused the search giant of copyright infringement over its practice of linking to French- and German-language Belgian newspapers.

The group, Copiepresse, sued Google in 2006, alleging that the search giant's use of headlines and snippets of Belgian newspaper articles in its Google News aggregation service, and its practice of providing links to cached copies of the articles in its main Web search results, violated copyright. A Belgian court sided with Copiepresse last September, ordering Google to remove the links.

Google complied with the order, but the two parties … Read more

Despite major TV networks claiming Aereo's illegitimacy, the streaming service now has an official cable TV partner: Bloomberg.

Aereo struck a deal with Bloomberg TV today to allow streaming news, according to The Wall Street Journal. Reportedly, Aereo will pay Bloomberg TV for its content, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"We believe that our members will see deep value adding in Bloomberg Television as their 'go-to' source for financial news," Aereo founder Chet Kanojia said in a statement, according to the Journal. While Bloomberg TV announced that it was "pleased to have … Read more

In its ongoing attempts to cash in on mobile, Facebook released yet another iOS update today, just hours after releasing its Android app.

The new iOS app boasts faster loading times for the news feed and Timeline, and the ability to choose which album to upload photos to. Facebook has been releasing these app updates at lighting speed over the last few months as part of the company's new mobile-first strategy. Its previous update, sent out less than a month ago, added the coveted "share" button.

Its new Android app also delivers a faster experience -- photos … Read more

Twitter said today that it has launched new tools that give advertisers better ways to match promoted tweets to search terms.

In a blog post this afternoon, Twitter said that advertisers can now choose to buy promoted tweets against exact keyword matches, phrase matches, or basic keyword matches. This should allow them to place their promoted tweets against a much wider selection of search terms, if they choose to do so.

At the same time, the microblogging service is now allowing advertisers to restrict their promoted tweets from showing up in searches for specific keywords. "For instance, if you … Read more

Yahoo has just injected its board with a whole lot of Silicon Valley firepower by adding PayPal cofounder Max Levchin.

Also serving as the chairman of boards at Kaggle and Yelp and as a director at Evernote, Levchin is a Silicon Valley all-star. He was PayPal's CTO until eBay bought the payment services company, after which he started the social media company Slide. Levchin sold Slide to Google in 2010, and is now leading HVF, a company that focuses on big data.

His appointment was coupled with the departure of two board members, Weather Channel CEO David Kenny and … Read more

Ever since Facebook snapped up the photo-sharing service Instagram -- a price that began at $1 billion but ended up at $715 million due to Facebook's sagging stock price -- Facebook watchers have been looking for ways that the company will make money from Instagram.

The obvious path -- although certainly not the only one -- is by sprinkling ads across Instagram. That strategy, according to Sterne Agee analysts Arvind Bhatia and Brett Strauser, could generate $500 million to $700 million in advertising revenue over the next three years. Even better, they argue in a report today, those would … Read more

With all the chatter about Apple upending the TV business as it did the music industry, you'd think the incumbent cable players were incapable of redefining the TV user experience. Comcast CEO Brian Roberts begs to differ. In an interview with Fortune, Roberts said he's taking lessons from Apple in how to "take really complicated things and make them simple, make them fun, make them beautiful and easy."

Read: CNET's Apple HDTV rumor roundup

He continued, "As I think about where I'd like to see us go, it is absolutely … Read more