What’s new with Freebase? Well, aside from its data now being used by Bing to provide information about entities in a similar way to Google’s Knowledge Graph, a new design of its web client is being tested here.

Its post about the new design highlights these as a few of the client’s biggest changes:

* A search bar at the top of the screen lets you filter the topic display and show any by domain, type or property. When you filter by domain, the page will show all of the types and their properties linked to the current topic. When filtering by type, it will show just the properties within that type and filtering by property will show just that property.

Also on the list: A better interface for jumping to any type, improved keyboard shortcuts, and displaying counts for properties with too many values to show on the page.

The entity graph of people, places and things – with more than 23 million topics about real world entities – also blogged last week about the growing amount of academic research using its data. It says that in 2012 it cataloged 59 new papers, up from 40 in 2011. Trending topics of research for 2012, it reports, included entity linking (8 papers), microblogging (6) and sentiment analysis (2). Linked data (8) and natural language processing (8) remained dominant forces on the list in 2011 and 2012.

Another event in late 2012 for Freebase: In December YouTube introduced a new Topics API that should make it easier for users to find the videos they’re really looking for by specifying Freebase topic IDs rather than search keywords.

From the Google Developers’ Blog: “For example, if you’re reading this post from outside of the US and you would like to search for content related to football, /m/02vx4 is probably the topic ID you’re after. The API’s universal search feature lets you retrieve channels, playlists and videos matching the topic with just one request like this one.”