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Google Acquires Metaweb

Posted by Soulskill on from the nothing-to-do-with-neal-stephenson dept.

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?"

17 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. Silly Logic by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Silly Logic by Monkeedude1212 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm not sure how you got from "Machines automatically creating and ranking indexed entities" to "Destroy all humans" but I'm sure it involved an illegal substance.

    2. Re:Silly Logic by Jurily · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm not sure how you got from "Machines automatically creating and ranking indexed entities" to "Destroy all humans" but I'm sure it involved an illegal substance.

      It's the AI that was supposed to index 4chan.

  2. Didn't see it coming. by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?
    1. Re:Didn't see it coming. by IAmGarethAdams · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I've been using Freebase integrations on a couple of sites, and the possibilities Freebase already offers for rich metadata integration is HUGE.

      For example, a couple of their simple API samples are a list of Police songs from the Synchronicity album, ordered by track length, or Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies

    2. Re:Didn't see it coming. by Joe+Tie. · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Reading over all of this, I've been wondering what the hell metaweb is. Your couple sentences explained it better than the pages of text leading up to it by others. Showing, in this case, seems far better to telling in order to properly describe it. And holy shit is that awesome!

      --
      Everything will be taken away from you.
    3. Re:Didn't see it coming. by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 2, Funny

      Once you start freebasing, you just can't stop.

  3. I never metaweb by abbynormal+brain · · Score: 2, Funny

    i didn't' like.

    --
    L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
  4. Rehab by masterwit · · Score: 4, Funny

    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
  5. Expanding reach by ceraphis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Expanding reach by thoughtsatthemoment · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In this case, Google is trying to enhance their core business that is search. The way we search on the internet is still quite primitive and it's also some kind of brute force. I bet all search engine providers are working on making their engines more intelligent and the result will ultimately decide which one will be the last one standing.

  6. Re:"Ontological" is a synonym for failure. by infinitelink · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Ontological" is an essential adjective for describing different aspects of knowledge (science); ontology for ordering it.

    --
    Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
  7. Re:"Ontological" is a synonym for failure. by LarryRiedel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    stuff that requires hard AI or tons of human labor and thus won't be happening any time soon.

    Wikipedia.

  8. Something Alta Vista had Google does not... by wowbagger · · Score: 5, Interesting

    In a way, I miss Alta Vista, in that they had a few things that Google does not:

    • NEAR operator (require the phases occur close in the page, which helped to eliminate the "pile of unrelated stuff" pages)
    • proper Boolean operators in the search, with arbitrary complexity (e.g. "((pre-emergent OR preemergent) AND herbicide AND liquid) AND NOT gluten")
    • and the thing that makes this post on-topic: Alta Vista had a search mode where-in you could refine your search by it presenting a set of additional search terms that helped qualify the meaning of what you searched for.

    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
    1. Re:Something Alta Vista had Google does not... by gilleain · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I wish they would just allow us to use regular expressions and be done with it ...

      There's a good reason why not - because of regex DDOS with people inputting "N(o|oo)" to match "Nooooooo....ooooo!" (or similar).

    2. Re:Something Alta Vista had Google does not... by Joe+Snipe · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

      --
      Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
    3. Re:Something Alta Vista had Google does not... by wowbagger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not quite the same. The Alta Vista approach grouped the tags - it would have grouped "tasting" with "red" and "white", while grouping "OLE" and "DirectX" in a separate grouping. Moreover, it was smart enough to use that grouping to allow you to select the whole group.

      Thus, Alta Vista was better able to detect that sometime "wine" means a beverage, and sometimes software, and that the two concepts are different.

      Google still has trouble understanding that the fermented liquid and the software aren't the same thing - it just throws a bunch of other search terms at you.

      --
      www.eFax.com are spammers