(A representative example, according to Metaweb: “If you were designing a page about Will Smith, a single query to Metaweb could get you rich metadata about him, an image, updates from his Facebook page, recent New York Times (NYSE: NYT) headlines about him, a gallery of his movies from Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), links to his pages on Wikipedia and IMDb, and a list of related topics your users might want to explore.”)

SEE ALSO: MetaWeb Gets $42 Million Second Round For Online Database

Google says it’s buying Metaweb to improve its search results,  In a blog post, it ties the deal to its recent efforts to include short answers to some fact-seeking queries directly on its search pages, saying that “together (with Metaweb) we’ll be able to provide better answers” to more complex queries.

As we’ve noted in the past, this is very much the way the search market appears to be headed. Microsoft’s Bing, for instance, has tried to differentiate itself with “instant answers,” which feature aggregated information at the top of results.

Google says it will also maintain Metaweb’s database—called Freebase—“as a free and open database for the world” and will contribute information to it.

No financial terms were released, but the acquisition price was likely substantial. Metaweb had raised $57 million in funding, including $42 million in a second round two and a half years ago.

Here’s a video explaining Metaweb’s approach: