Google’s strategy of owning small but high voltage web companies continues. Metaweb is the newest addition to the Google acquisition list. Google Director of Product Management Jack Menzel has announced Google’s acquisition of Metaweb, a San Francisco based company that maintains an open database of things in the world. “We’ve acquired Metaweb because we believe working together we’ll be able to provide better answers”, says Google Blog. This take over will give Google an extra edge in understanding the facts about real people and real events out in the world thereby facilitating the kind of web experience searchers really looking for.
Another interesting tidbit of this acquisition is Freebase, the entity graph free open database of Metaweb. “Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone.” said Jack Menzel.
What is Metaweb
Metaweb Technologies founded in 2005 is a San Francisco based open database facilitator which allows site owners, publishers and developers to easily and intelligently integrate content from across the Web. Metaweb maintains a strong content integration network with regularly updated database. Bloggers, site owners, developers can make use of this third party open data source for improving their site’s content structure. Metaweb has information on over 11 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Freebase is another web property of Metabase which connects entities together as graph where anyone can contribute data. Each data has got a unique ID which distinguishes each entity. An entity can be people/places/or thing. You can read the story of Metaweb Joins Google from Freebase Blog too.
Search is Getting Smarter!
Definitely, Metaweb’s semantic data storage technology will further empower Google in offering a smarter search experience. Big ‘G’ is tapping into all the possible ways to continue their search market share. By pocketing Metaweb Google has added a promising addition to its arsenal.
on
It seems now people are taking Google's acquisition stories less interestingly as this is a continuing trend; Google is always using third party technologies to expand its search empire.