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?"

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 [freebase.com], or Graduates of Stanford born since 1960 who are board members of companies [freebase.com]

Expanding reach

[ceraphis]

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.

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).

From the early days to acquisition!

[yppiz]

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!

Re:Expanding reach

[thoughtsatthemoment]

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.

Re:Something Alta Vista had Google does not...

[gilleain]

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 [wikipedia.org] with people inputting "N(o|oo)" to match "Nooooooo....ooooo!" (or similar).