We wrote about Metaweb back in 2008 when they received a significant chunk of funding to the tune of $42 million, on top of their first round of $15 million back in 2006. Since then the company has built its Freebase open database into a collection of over 12 million items from entertainment (movies, books, TV shows) to locations, celebrities, companies and other "real world" objects. Google says the plan is to preserve and further develop the database and hope to enlist other companies to make use of and contribute to the data.
In addition to fleshing out Freebase, Google also hopes to leverage Metaweb to enhance its efforts with features like rich snippets and search answers, both of which aim to give back "smarter" and more immediate results to specific queries. Right now, simpler requests like "Barack Obama birthday" and "events in San Jose" can spawn relevant answers right at the top of the search results page, but Google hopes to take this initiative further by feeding in more facts about the real world from Metaweb's data repository.
For an overview of what Metaweb has been working on, check out the video below. Let us know what you think: will this acquisition help Google deliver better search results?