Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever - The Atlantic

More details on Metaweb => Google Knowledge Graph

"After five long years, they had 12 million objects in the database. And they were purchased by Google. In the first year after the acquisition, they had 25 million things. What did Google bring to the acquisition, aside from money? Data, of course, of a very specific kind. Before, they were just guessing at what people might want to know (cheese, rivers, highways, etc). With Google's search data, they *know* what users are after, so they can go about finding and making that information available.

With Google's help, their database has grown rapidly to over 500 million items objects. That's orders of magnitude larger than previous attempts to educate artificial intelligences like the Cyc project out of the University of Texas. (Though it should be noted that Cyc has some capabilities that the Knowledge Graph does not.)"

Technology - Alexis Madrigal - Inside Google's Plan to Build a Catalog of Every Single Thing, Ever - The Atlantic