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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

The comparison to Google's Knowledge Graph was misleading. The article frames Diffbot as _a_ database until the last section, where the article introduces the capability for customers to build their own proprietary knowledge graphs. That's much more interesting.

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Founder here. I wouldn't describe what we are doing as cloning Google's Knowledge Graph. Rather, we're trying to build a machine that autonomously learns from reading the web, and makes that structured data accessible and queryable to any app, smart device, or business that uses data. You can also tell Diffbot what part of the web to crawl.

Our APIs power consumer services including Instapaper and DuckDuckGo to enterprise applications like content management and market intelligence.

The article mentions that you power the Bing infoboxes (or whatever the equivalent Bing term is).

How does that relate to Bing's use of Probase (their concept-graph)?

Unfortunately, I can't speak about this customer integration without permission. You can try to ask questions about Diffbot, though!

You said that Diffbot reads the web autonomously. Is it able to learn a language on its own? I'd be very interested in this (business-wise) if it could provide results in my mother tongue.

Working on it. The reliance on visual features means it works decently well on extracting from international pages. Try putting in foreign-language product pages or article pages into our homepage testdrive or with a developer token to see an example.

It seems like it is both, since the article also says

  Diffbot says its database now spans about 600 million
  objects, and the hope is ...

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