Stories by DQL

The Top Coding Bootcamps For Founders According To The Knowledge Graph

Last week we took a look at the top universities for female founders. In our results, we noted that our web-reading AI associates tech bootcamp attendance with education, and a large cluster of founders attended specific universities in conjunction with bootcamps.

New to the Knowledge Graph? Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph is constructed by crawling a vast majority of the web and structuring data on pages using NLP and machine vision. The end result is one of the world’s largest databases of organizations, people, articles, products and more, all linked and with data provenance.

To return results from the Knowledge Graph, you submit queries which filter which entities to return. In this case we queried the Knowledge Graph to return individuals who:

  1. Attended an educational institution with the name of a top bootcamp
  2. Have held a job title including “CEO,” “chief executive officer,” or “founder”

We then returned a facet (summary) view of how many of these individuals attended each bootcamp.

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Merrill Cook

The Best Schools For Female Founders According To The Knowledge Graph

Upon seeing Crunchbase’s annual ranking of the best schools for graduating entrepreneurs, we wanted to see how our Knowledge Graph results stack up.

The Diffbot Knowledge Graph is sourced from crawling a majority of the web and extracting entities and facts using NLP and machine vision.

Two prominent entity types are person and organization entities. When paired together powerful observations sourced from across the web are possible. In this exploration we returned all person entities within the Knowledge Graph who are currently founders and who are female. We filtered to make sure each organization had at least some publicly disclosed funding, and then we took a look at a summary view of which schools these founders had attended. You can check out the Knowledge Graph query here with a free trial.

While the top schools for female founders were consistent with Crunchbase’s coverage, you may wonder why the numbers vary so dramatically. Crunchbase’s ranking this year was looking at 2019-2020 graduates, and Crunchbase’s data is centered around tech and startup firmographics. While Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph certainly has firmographic details on tech-centered companies, our database of organizations is much wider ranging (over 250M+ orgs at last count). This means our list includes founders of all sorts of endeavors: non-profits, artistic organizations, medical organizations, and tech companies to name a few.

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Merrill Cook

Startup Revenue By County With Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph

What can you do with billions of web-sourced facts on hundreds of millions of organizations? Beyond analyzing the facts themselves, you (or a machine of your choice) can learn a lot. Historically, our Knowledge Graph has had one of the largest collections of publicly-disclosed organization revenue. Recently, we’ve applied machine learning processes across many org fields to estimate revenue for private organizations as well.

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Merrill Cook

Using the Knowledge Graph to Segment Big Tech Investments By Industry

Every big tech investment is big news. If your firm raises a funding round with prestigious investors or is acquired, you better bet you’ll spread the news far and wide.

But where can you go for this information en masse? Even covering a handful of big investors over a handful of years can lead to a list of thousands of invested in firms. And a list of firms themselves isn’t that useful. Sure, some big names pop out. But how do you see what “plays” big tech is making?

That’s where our web-reading bots come in. By working through billions of web pages using NLP and machine vision, Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph is the largest public-web sourced database of organizations, articles, people, products, and events. For each entity — organization, articles, people, etc. — facts are vetted and accumulated to create a filterable, searchable database of “things.” So when we wanted to check out which industries big tech has invested in over the last decade, we knew right where to turn. No analyst middlepersons, just public web data structured into a market intel-rich format.

Big Tech Investment By Industry 2010-2021

Distribution of industries of organizations invested in by Facebook, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Netflix from 2010 to July 2021. Firmographic data sourced from Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph.
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Merrill Cook

Context Matters, Tracking Quote Spread Across The Web In A Historic Year

Hindsight is 20/20. And as we usher in a new president in what has been one of the most tumultuous years in American history, we can begin to see clarity about the forces that moved throughout our jobs, our lives, and our collective imagination.

Another way to put this is that over time we tend to have more context.

Within Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph, one unique lens through which we can leverage the context of semantic data is by looking at the speakers of quotes.

When our AI reads articles it pulls out quotes, and when it can it attributes a speaker to these quotes. As our crawlers traverse the entirety of the public web, sources of quotes are validated and over time some quotes circulate more than others.

When performing a facet search, this lets us essentially show something like a retweet count for the entire web. This answers questions like whose voices are being heard? And what speakers are the most widely cited in a given topic?

To commemorate the end of an era, let’s take a look at a few of the most circulated statements of the last 365 days.

What were the 10 most circulated quotes across the web by President Joe Biden in the last 365 days?

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Merrill Cook

Stories By DQL: Tracking the Sentiment of a City


The story: sentiment of news mentions of Gaza fluctuate by as much as 2000% a week. 90% of news mentions about Minneapolis have had negative sentiment through the first week in June 2020 (they’re typically about 50% negative). Positive sentiment news mentions about New York City have steadily increased week by week through the pandemic.

Locations are important. They help form our identities. They bring us together or apart. Governance organizations, journalists, and scholars routinely need to track how one location perceives another. From threat detection to product launches, news monitoring in Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph makes it easy to take a truly global news feed and dissect how entities being talked about.

In this story by DQL discover ways to query millions of articles that feature location data (towns, cities, regions, nations).

How we got there: One of the most valuable aspects of Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph is the ability to utilize the relationships between different entity types. You can look for news mentions (article entities) related to people, products, brands, and more. You can look for what skills (skill or people entities) are held by which companies. You can look for discussions on specific products.
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Merrill Cook

Stories By DQL: George Floyd, Police, and Donald Trump

We will get justice. We will get it. We will not let this door close.

– Philonise Floyd, Brother of George Floyd

News coverage this week centered on George Floyd, police, and Donald Trump. COVID-19 related news continue to dominate globally.
That’s the macro story from all Knowledge Graph article published in the last week. But Knowledge Graph article entities provide users with many ways to traverse and dissect breaking news. By facet searching for the most common phrases in articles tagged “George Floyd” you see a nuanced view of the voices being heard.

In this story hopefully you can begin to see the power of global news mentions that can be sliced and diced on so many levels. Wondering how to gain these insights for yourself? Below we’ll work through how to perform these queries in detail.

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Merrill Cook