Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco company that built Freebase, an open, collaboratively edited database of structured knowledge about the world. Co-founded in 2005 by Danny Hillis and John Giannandrea, it was acquired by 📝Google in 2010.

Freebase was an attempt to make general knowledge machine-readable at scale: entities with typed properties and explicit relationships between them, assembled from bulk-imported public datasets and refined by community editing. It arrived when the semantic web was still largely an academic project, and its bet was that a usable structured corpus mattered more than a perfect ontology. The acquisition folded that data into the Knowledge Graph — the entity panel appearing alongside search results, and the substrate for direct-answer results generally. Freebase itself was retired in 2016 and its contents migrated to Wikidata, where the project effectively continues. Giannandrea went on to run Google's search and artificial intelligence organization before joining Apple to lead machine learning and AI strategy. The lineage is worth tracing: the structured-knowledge layer underneath modern search, and later underneath retrieval systems feeding language models, runs directly through this company.