Google announced today that it has acquired Metaweb Technologies, a company based in San Francisco that developed Freebase, an “open, shared database of the world’s knowledge.” A semantic web startup, Metaweb was founded in 2005 by Danny Hillis, John Giannandrea, and Robert Cook and was run under the parent company Applied Minds.
This could lead Google even further into the realm of semantic search. According to Gigaom, Google says it plans to use Metaweb to “help handle complicated and hard-to-understand search queries by getting a better understanding of the 12 million people, places and things in Freebase and how they relate to each other.”