Imagine you could get the entire web in a database, and structure it. Then you would be able to get answers to complex questions in seconds by querying, rather than searching. This is what Diffbot promises.

The web is among humankind’s greatest achievements and resources. Ever-expanding and nearly all-encompassing, we’ve all come to depend on it. There’s just one problem: It takes work to get information out of it.

That’s because the information is in documents, and documents on the web are all over the place, and someone needs to locate them, and read them, to extract that information. Search engines have come a long way, and they greatly assist in the locating part, but not so much in the extracting part. At least, not until today.

Google and its ilk may sometimes give the impression they can understand and answer questions. Part of the reason is the addition of human knowledge in the mix. Google famously went from using purely text-based and statistical methods to adding a form of curation when it bought MetaWeb. MetaWeb developed Freebase, which was a crowd-sourced knowledge graph, similar in approach to Wikipedia, which was integrated in Google’s search engine.

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