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Google Acquires Metaweb
eldavojohn writes "A startup called Metaweb (looks like an ontological, entity-based approach to Web 2.0 tagging) has been acquired by Google. You can find out what they're about from a super marketing fluff video they put together. The neat thing about Metaweb is that the database of entities it has is free. Will Google be able to make Metaweb work on their omniscient scale, or was this just Google making sure a startup doesn't become yet another player in search?"
Will Google be able to make Metaweb work on their omniscient scale, or was this just Google making sure a startup doesn't become yet another player in search?"
If Metaweb doesn't work at Google's Scale, then it couldn't compete with them.
"Ontological" is a synonym for failure. Time after time after time after time we hear about how important the so-called "semantic web" is, yet it just doesn't take off. Why is that? Because it's useless, and nobody really wants it.
Everyone was thinking Google would take over the Web, and here they skip right past it and acquire the Metaweb.
Well played, Google, well played.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
i didn't' like.
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
I really wanted the video to keep zooming further and further out.. That woosh sound was amazing.
Will Google be able to make Metaweb work on their omniscient scale, or was this just Google making sure a startup doesn't become yet another player in search?
Wrong and wrong, you see Google is freebasing now:
The web isn’t merely words[, or water-soluble,] it’s information about things in the real world, and understanding the relationships between real-world entities...
Sometimes you have to give it a good ole "smoke-test" to see the possibilities...Google should be careful though, the path they have chosen is a slippery slope!
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
They sure have an ugly web page.
Looks like this may be a way to make a play for competition in homeland security and business support, like Palantir has done plus medical data tracking, and other possible extrapolations
I'm fairly sure it's not going to be used for just generating websites.
First winter rain-
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.
-Basho
Slowly but surely google continues to acquire startups and expand their business. Not that I mind it that much in Google's case but isn't this the type of thing that Microsoft or AT&T eventually got hammered for?
Legitimately wondering if Microsoft and AT&T did it much more dastardly or if there's no significant comparison whatsoever.
One of the challenges with generating and using data sets is cleaning them up. Data entry errors, OCR failures, conflicts between multiple sources, etc. make it a pain to search and summarize data. Gridworks helps me hunt down bad records and normalize fields. If it keeps improving, people might start using it before publishing their crap data.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
<forced straight face>
I think Google just wants a product that competes with Daniel Brandt's NameBase.
</forced straight face>
I originally thought this said "MEATweb", which either is an awesome web-based steak delivery service or the name of a pr0n site...
Was anyone else amused by this? (RTFA)
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
In a way, I miss Alta Vista, in that they had a few things that Google does not:
Say you searched for "wine", and activated that mode. It would present you with some possible extra terms you could search on, such as "white", "red", "tannic", "windows", "microsoft", "emulator".
Were you to be searching for the fermented beverage, you could select "red", "white", "tannic" and so on.
Were you searching for the ABI adapter package, you could select "windows", "Microsoft", and "emulator" (which yes, Wine is NOT...)
I'd love to see Google add that sort of refinement, ideally "learning" what sorts of terms go with what (Wine + tannic = beverage, wine + OLE = software).
www.eFax.com are spammers
I was on the founding team at Metaweb when we spun out of Applied Minds. I can answer some questions here, but first I wanted to congratulate the team that brought this company all the way to acquisition.
So, from the beginning we knew that semantic this and ontology that would be a non-starter for most contributors from Planet Earth. While Freebase is a complex system under the hood, the user interface makes contributing data to an existing type (schema) pretty easy. You can add content from a browser window and never know that all of your entries are typed by the system. You can upload a spreadsheet of data and not have to do anything more than say which column is linked to what field in Freebase.
My startup, 24 Hr. Diner, uses Freebase to demo our artist to artist recommendation engine, Jukebox. We have recommendations for 100k artists, and for each of them, we can look up their genre info and photo on Freebase without having to maintain all of that data ourselves.
And if anyone on Slashdot is working for a co. that could use an excellent recommendation engine that handles music, videos, and general web content, ping me!
Look forward to Freebasing with Google!
my sig
It seems to me all Google has done in the last few years is acquire one company after another, including Android. In house developments don't seem to be that innovative anymore and some of them turn out to be a useless piece of shit everybody hates, e.g. Buzz.
Well done, Google.
All your (free)base are belong to us.