[rryan]

The person who replaced Amit as head of search (John Giannandrea) is the founder / CEO of Metaweb and creator of Freebase -- aka what became Google's Knowledge Graph. Google using more ML in search doesn't mean a KG isn't also useful for query understanding.

And KGs aren't mutually exclusive with ML -- e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04844