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It has been announced that Google have bought the San Francisco based company; Metaweb. The Metaweb database called Freebase is, unlike Google, able to understand the relationship between people, places and things. The database then assists the website in making these connections between those words. The use of Freebase by SEO services could prove very beneficial and has been described as a “tremendous resource” by Jack Menzel; director of product management at Google.

The database currently indexes information on over 12 million subjects, including books, TV and film, celebrities, businesses, countries and more. Metaweb want to encourage other web companies to contribute to this huge catalogue of data.

Google intend to utilise Freebase to generate more relevant and accurate results when users search using complicated questions. Google’s current algorithm cannot cope with complicated questions i.e.  ‘Bands from Manchester who have had a top 10 single.’ Freebase will be able to understand the question resulting in more relevant Google results. This is a positive advancement for the search engine.

2009 saw much advancement in the world of web design; from the launch of Microsoft’s Bing and localized search to Twitter and the social media explosion. However, not one of these innovations has prompted the widespread speculation and industry coverage as Google’s new ‘hero product’ Caffeine.

Sure, anybody who works in web design, online advertising or any incarnation of SEO, is used to the hegemonic control Google has on the online space, yet, when Matt Cutts announced that Google caffeine will rolled out across all data centers at the beginning of 2010, the digital world took a collective deep breath as we waiting to see what impact this would have on our SEO rankings and web design performance.

So what is Caffeine and what will it mean for your website and SEO? Well, ultimately it was devised with the objective of getting on step further to real time search and results will now combine tweets, facebook status and blog posts in all first page listings.

But what does it mean for the world of online marketing? Like all Google changes we will just have to wait and see . . .

Search marketing is a relatively new advertising medium – the first search ads were only served in 1998, but it has already become a major factor in the advertising plan of a wide range of industry sectors.

Figures from the IAB suggest that the total online ad spend in the UK was £6 billion last year – with paid search accounting for 45% – and that figure is set to rise in 2010. Of course, figures for the amounts marketers spend on paid search will only ever tell part of the search marketing story – it would be impossible to accurately measure what marketers spend on the other side of the equation, search engine optimisation, the quasi-art, quasi-science of making websites perform better in natural search.

What it does tell us, is that the world of web design and SEO waits for no man, so if brand owners are ever going to be successful online, they need to get to grips with the nature of Search Marketing today, and how it integrates with their entire online marketing strategy.