July 22, 2010 – Acknowledging their weakness in searching for duplicate meaning terms, Google purchases Metaweb – a San Francisco start-up that says it makes Web sites smarter.
The New York Times carried this news in their article, “Google Buys Metaweb to Improve Search Results”. Metaweb claims to help Web sites link information based on connections between people, places and things, instead of words. This fills the niche left in search by Google’s problem with searching for a word that means many different things. Web sites can tap into and use Metaweb’s technology as Metaweb gets the information from all over the Web, and from anyone who wants to contribute to its huge database, called Freebase. Volunteers have already entered 12 million things, including movies, books and companies. Google will maintain the open Freebase database. Sounds like a Wikipedia of metadata.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
