Again, at SMX West last week, Paul Haahr from Google said that when Google launched their knowledge graph in 2012, they decided to put entities at the forefront of their query analysis.
He explained that in order to show knowledge panels, the query needs to understand if there is any entity data there. So they moved that to the first part of the query analysis back in 2012, in order to surface knowledge graph data.
Here are some tweets with the information:
Google started looking at entities in search queries when they started with the knowledge graph. #smx @haahr
— Jennifer Slegg (@jenstar) March 3, 2016
First part of query analysis is looking for entities, began with knowledge graph. @haahr #SMX
— Jonah Stein (@Jonahstein) March 3, 2016
Forum discussion at Twitter.