As William points out, Google has quietly acquired Transformic Inc.
Earlier this year, it purchased the rights to a new way of searching the Web — allowing users to find and extract summaries of Web pages — developed by a 26-year-old, Israeli-born doctoral student in Australia. Last month, it bought Neven Vision Inc., which makes image recognition software — something that could help make pictures searchable. It’s also picked up Transformic Inc., a tiny firm that developed an engine for searching databases that reside behind Web sites, and Akwan Information Technologies, a Brazilian maker of specialized search engines for businesses and other institutions. “When we talk about search, we talk about [searching] everything,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in July.WashingtonPost
Search is evolving to become something that it’s never been before. Google wants to dig deeper into websites, more than it ever has before. Google is not just interested in what is on the front of a website or maybe not even just what is in the subpages of a website, but Google is interested in the database behind a website. How a robot might access that or even be able to look at it from any angle is beyond my knowledge. It does lead me to believe they have something very peculiar coming up with Googlebot and possibly something the community may not like. I know I’ve covered my bases to secure my databases, but I really do wonder what they are getting at with this new search technology.
