Strategic move for Google: the acquisition of Metaweb, a company specializing in semantic web and semantic search mechanisms, has been formalized.
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The financial details of the acquisition of Metaweb by Google have not been disclosed, but the event is of great importance in the field of search results.
By integrating into the mechanisms of the semantic web, Google will allow users to access increasingly precise search results. This will be possible thanks to the use of metadata, elements that allow algorithms to fully understand the user’s request – even complex ones.
In this way, by performing searches even in the form of questions, the search engine will be able to provide coherent and more in-depth results, analyzing not so much and not only the presence of the keyword, but its semantic meaning.
Google thus continues to invest in the direction of search engine searches, although it is plausible to think that the acquisition of Metaweb may have been a move aimed at eliminating a competition that would have become potentially dangerous.
In concrete terms, Google acquires a technology and also the team of engineers involved in its development. Not only that: with this operation, Google has also acquired Freebase, another product of Metaweb. It is a database rich in 12 million “elements”, data relevant for semantic search: photos, books, news, events. Far from being static, Freebase is an open project, therefore potentially expandable day by day, from “entity” to “entity”.
According to Google‘s declared intentions, Freebase will remain a separate project from everything else, while giving great consideration to its application value.
It is therefore plausible to think that soon, in the Google search bar, users will be able to formulate real questions to which the engine will be able to respond not only through occurrences and popularity of queries but also regarding the true meaning of the words used.
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