Google Knowledge Graph related question

[JamesAMartin]

I have a client who is facing age discrimination in the film industry. (Big surprise there.) The problem is, when you type in his name, Google's new Knowledge Graph displays a brief bio about him to the right of the search results. This bio snippet includes his year of birth. Wikipedia is credited as the source for the bio information about him, and yet, his Wikipedia entry doesn't include his age or birth date. Neither does his iMDb bio. So the question is, How can he figure out where Google is getting that birthdate from? He wants to try and remove it, not falsify it. Thanks for any help you can offer.

[RyanKent]

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620861

Here are just some of the sources for this web of information:

• online resources like Wikipedia
• subject-specific resources like Weather Underground for weather information and the World Bank for economic statistics
• publicly available data from Freebase.com, a free and open database of over 24 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies, and more
• Google search data (used to measure the popularity of a subject and help decide what information people most want to see)

There are two other official sources of information regarding the Knowledge Graph that I am aware of:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

Both are more promotional based information sources and lack any details about the mechanics or sources involved.

I presume you have tried searching google for your client's name + date of birth and similar queries?

There is a (longshot) chance the Report a Problem feature can be used by you to share the problem your client is facing and ask the information be removed. I have a difficult time thinking Google is willing to remove accurate information.

[JamesAMartin]

Great answer, Ryan. And yes, I did a Google search on the client's name and his year of birth. After some digging, I did find a Freebase article on him that listed his year of birth, so I simply edited the date out. We'll see if that works.

Thanks so much for your fast and thorough response!