Google Search Is About To Get Better

In case you don’t know about the history of Google and how it became the world’s #1 search engine, here is a quick summary. Google started in 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergi Brin. Before Google, search engines displayed results based on the number of times a term appeared on a page. Page and Brin thought there was a better way of ranking this information and developed PageRank, which determined relevance based mostly on the number of other pages linking to that page, among other various factors. Since Google provided better search results, it quickly went on to dominate search engine market share.

I was curious about the history of Google’s search engine market share, so I did a quick search to uncover the evolution of their market share.  I was hoping I could gain some data from the 1998-2002 period, but I was able to come across some very interesting statistics. Google’s market share in March 2005 was 36.4%, Yahoo had 30.6% market share, and MSN had 16.5% market share. Google now has an 86% market share, while Bing has 6.1%, and Yahoo has 4.7%.

What I wanted to highlight however was that Google acquired Metaweb recently to make their search results even better. I was surprised to find that out myself, but Google actually bought out another company to help them improve their search engine. I wanted to know the price tag on this acquisition, but the details on the deal have not been released yet. I just love hearing how all of these small startup companies can come up with amazing ideas and get bought out by the likes of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or any other big tech company for millions or even billions of dollars.

The Los Angeles Times provided a little more information on what Metaweb does:

Metaweb provides an online database of “over 12 million things” that range from information on college tuition to data on gadgets. The service is designed for website owners who want to extend the functionality of their sites by making the company’s database content available to users.

According to Google, the addition of Metaweb to its team will help it improve its search offering. Currently, Google Search displays answers to simple questions — such as “What time is it?” — at the top of its results page, rather than force users to go to another site. Metaweb will help Google Search answer more complex questions, such as “How many actors who are more than 40 years old have won an Oscar?”

Google plans to use Metaweb’s database to deliver the answers in its results.

A major part of Metaweb is its free and open database of 12 million things, which Google will contribute to develop and keep open. You can also read more about the acquisition on Google’s Official Blog and Metaweb’s blog.

Here is a video explanation of how Metaweb works: