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?"

Comments

Silly Logic

[Monkeedude1212]

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.

Didn't see it coming.

[pushing-robot]

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.

Re:Didn't see it coming.

[IAmGarethAdams]

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

Rehab

[masterwit]

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!

Re:"Ontological" is a synonym for failure.

[LarryRiedel]

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

Wikipedia.

Something Alta Vista had Google does not...

[wowbagger]

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).