Some people believe that Google’s practices when it comes to search are mystical and unfair — or sometimes evil — but what the company wants to do is surface the most important information for you when you perform a task on its most important product. With the introduction of Knowledge Graph last year, Google started showing information on the right-hand side of search results to help you figure out if you’re searching for the right thing, be it a person, place or thing.
Today, Google announced that it’s now filling up its Knowledge Graph with information about nonprofits, which will help people find the organization they’d like to check out and potentially donate to.
In its announcement, Google said that this is still in its early rollout phase, with more information being added all the time:
We’ve just started to add information about nonprofits to the Knowledge Graph. When you search for a nonprofit organization on Google.com, you will start to see information to the right side of the search results that highlights the nonprofit’s financials, cause, and recent Google+ posts. Start following the organization on Google+ directly from the panel by clicking the Follow button. To learn more about related nonprofits, click on one of the organizations under “People also search for” and a carousel of similar organizations will appear at the top of the search results. Over time, we’ll continue to work on bringing more nonprofit information into your search experience.
In addition to key information about nonprofits, including their categories and tax deductibility codes, Google is promoting their Google+ pages, as well. This means that Google+ could immediately become a hot spot for nonprofits to find new volunteers, avenues for fundraising and, more importantly, awareness for their campaigns and causes.
While all known nonprofits aren’t available in Knowledge Graph yet, it looks like most of the big ones are. You’ll notice that Google is also publishing the last Google+ post from the organization, allowing people to jump right into a conversation:
This is yet another example of how Google has strategically, and with precision, started to stitch together all of its products to create a world where people can spend just a little bit of time and get better results and information quicker. It’s also an example of how Google+ has become the connective tissue to make all of these connections happen.