Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation.
(one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)
Google acquired Metaweb Technologies in 2010, acquiring Freebase with it. Freebase was a semantic web knowledge base and this became deeply integrated into Google's search technology. They did, in fact, want to push semantic web attributes to make the web more indexable, even though they originated neither the bigger idea nor the original implementation.
(one of my classmates ended up as an engineer at Metaweb, then Google)