Google is getting really good at one particular thing that has spurred much of their recent growth.  It’s one skill that can only be mastered by a company with TONS of cash. I suppose you can call it the art of ‘acquisition’.

Or more simply, they buy a lot of fledgling companies that are packed with web geniuses that can help Google tromp forward across their vast online kingdom.

This time, I’m actually pretty intrigued by their newest purchase of Metaweb, a hyper ambitious group of people putting together a database of the web’s info called Freebase.

I’ll skip the boring details of how they acquired Metaweb and who works there, and give you a quick explanation of what Metaweb does and how they can help Google be a better place for you and me.

Metaweb is tackling the problem created by semantics, where one word can mean many different things. This is something that standard search engines can’t fully overcome.

So Metaweb is building a search database built off of entities (a singular person, place or thing).  The easiest way to put this is to say you wanted to search for Female Novelists in New York City.  Instead of searching for pages that have those three defining keywords, Metaweb will relate entities to one another until it narrows it down.

In the end it gets boiled down to a few different relevant entities (novelists, new yorkers, females, etc) and how they relate. If everything goes correctly, exact results will index and not just pages that have all or most of  your broad keywords.

Another way you can use Metaweb would be to select an entity like a popular band, then ask Metaweb for what’s under the hood of the particular entity. There you could access their songs, biographies, pics, vids, etc.  Pretty sweet ineed.

At some point Google will start using Metaweb to help them out with the difficult searches that they currently struggle with.  At the end of the day this is Google getting smarter.

Getting smarter could be good and bad for us Internet marketers.  Agreed?  Smarter could mean more accurate indexing of our content but it could also mean we have more hurdles to leap through to get solid rankings. What do you think?  Comment Below!