Technology

The latest and potentially most game changing purchase in Google’s recent spending spree is Metaweb. It is a revolutionary new technology that is set to change the way we interact on the web, create websites, and manage ever changing data on everything we talk about.

The principle behind Metaweb is that people use many different names for the same objects or people in their conversations on the web. The example used in the video is the University of California, Berkeley. People might refer to the school as, UCB, Cal, Cal Berkeley, Berkeley, ect. Metaweb’s goal is to link all these different names with the same place and create a single entity that represents all of them. On the other hand, you have words like “jaguar”. This could refer to an animal, a car, or a sports team. Metaweb would identify which “entity” the publisher is referring to and track the relevant data around it.

Ultimately, webmasters will be able to plug these entities into their website and auto-populate the pages with new data and the social stream associated with that entity. This could potentially represent a fundamental change in the way we build and optimize web pages. There is no doubt that Google will begin to give credit to and boost the ranking of sites that incorporate this technology, in the future.

Currently, the implementation of Metaweb is a little code heavy for the average user. However, as this idea gains more traction, widgets and extensions will be built to make implementation easier.