It has been observed that when systems break down we get to actually see how they operate. I wonder what this breakage below says about the use of Freebase and Wikipedia data in Google’s Knowlege Graph.

Yes, that’s an image of Braeburn from My Little Pony to the right, and text about the apple to the left. Interestingly it’s fine at Wikipedia:

And it’s not even there in Freebase (according to a search).

I don’t know if this reveals what’s going on in the flow of entities between Wikipedia, Freebase and Google. But I thought it was interesting. I wonder where to report such an anomaly. Is there a place?

Thanks to Jeff Godin in #code4lib for noticing the breakage in Knowledge Graph.

See also Hilary Mason’s post about how her identity got mixed up on Bing. (Thanks Chris).

Update: 2012-02-04

I thought to check a week later, and the The Knowledge Graph results got even funnier, now it’s a collage of apples and My Little Pony: