Google is building the largest store of information in human history — a knowledge base that autonomously gathers and merges data from across the web to provide unprecedented access to all facts about the world. The search giant is building Knowledge Vault, a type of knowledge base — a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Google’s existing knowledge base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information.

It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true, New Scientist reported.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, said that the world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults. Google researcher Kevin Murphy and his colleagues will present a paper on Knowledge Vault at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in New York.

“Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he said.