Many interesting searches involve named entities, individual objects or ideas that are referred to by stable names. Named entities are a useful way of summarizing books or pages. When you search, click on the “Entities” in the sidebar to get a list of entities that are associated with your search terms. (The search terms may be, but do not need to be, names themselves.)

A search for “Oneida” returns places named Oneida, as well as the Oneida Indians; the other tribes associated with them in the Iriquois Confederacy; and the Oneida Community, a 19th century utopian society.

Some of the entities (such as Oneida, New York) have been disambiguated by matching them to records in an authority list, or knowledge base, like Wikipedia. In addition to allowing us to distinguish names that can refer to multiple entities, this process helps us aggregate instances of entities that are referred to by multiple names.