Google has bought up a smaller but 'smarter' search engine in an effort to further improve their user results.
The search engine giant has purchased Metaweb, a San Francisco start-up that claims to make websites smarter. Google hopes its technology will help address tricky search areas, such as some words that mean many different things.
Jack Menzel, director of product management at Google, said Metaweb's ability to link information based on connections between people, places and things, instead of words, was what the complexity of the internet now necessitated.
"The Web isn’t merely words," Mr Menzel wrote in an official blog post on the matter. “It’s information about things in the real world and understanding the relationships between real-world entities can help us deliver relevant information more quickly.”
Metaweb pulls information from all over the internet and from anyone who wants to contribute, compiling it all in a huge database called Freebase, which Google will now maintain.
Web sites can then tap into the database allowing, for example, a movie review site to pull in a trailer video, a list of showtimes and a movie poster image all from one search. It will also enhance the results searches for strings of words and terms.
The price of the deal was not revealed, but was thought to be more than the $57 million in venture capital that Metaweb has raised from Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, DAG Ventures, Millennium Technology Ventures and the Omidyar Network.
