Google has announced that it has acquired Metaweb, a company that maintains "an open database of things in the world". Central to Metaweb's products is Freebase, a free and open database of over 12 million items, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google plans to use this content to improve search beyond words by an understanding of the relationships between real-world entities that can help to deliver relevant information more quickly.

With features like rich snippets and the search answers feature, Google says that they are still just beginning to apply an understanding of the web to make search better. By using the technology developed by Metaweb, Google wants to make search more effective by developing semantic search which will be able to provide better answers.

Google says that they want to maintain Freebase as a free and open database, as well as further develop this tool with the Metaweb team to make it a richer online resource that will also benefit from third-party developers using the open source platform to improve the service.

The Sydney Morning Herald covers the launch of a new enhancement to Google's search results pages which have been based on a technology developed by an Australian. The new feature adds other suggested search phrases at the bottom of the results for a particular term and developed from work completed by Ori Allon, a PhD student at the University of New South Wales who is now employed by Google and working in the US.

Google’s new search results claim to “better understand associations and concepts related to your search”, and therefore to deliver a more meaningful search experience. This is achieved by integrating a new technology into the Google search infrastructure which displays related terms based on these concepts and associations related to the original search query.

Whether many people notice these changes and start to use the suggested links will be interesting to see, but Google hopes it will further increase the usage and loyalty of users by creating the best possible search experience.

Following their failed attempt to buy Yahoo! over the past few months, Microsoft are looking at new ways to develop their online market share and web technology skills through acquisition. Although top executives were quoted in the Financial Times only last week saying that they would not be pursuing a spate of acquisitions - including rumours of Facebook and AOL now being targets - it hasn't taken them long to set their sights elsewhere.

This week Microsoft have announced their purchase of Powerset, a semantic search engine based in Silicon Valley. The news has been widely reported, including by Venture Beat, and the price being paid is over $100m which could be good value for money if the technology can be developed and used to Microsoft's advantage ahead of similar work by Google.

Semantic search is seen to be the next big development within search, whereby the search engine will attempt to understand the searcher's typical requirement based on the search terms being used and so display more relevant results to suit users' needs. Google is working on this technology but may be some way off launching a workable model, so if Microsoft have assessed this new purchase correctly and can take advantage of the specialist skills that come with the company, they could steal a march on Google in the future.