For the last quarter century, the KnowItAll project has focused on accumulating massive amounts of information from the web by utilizing domain-independent, fully automated techniques. If successful, this effort has the potential to address the long-standing 'Knowledge Acquisition Bottleneck' in Artificial Intelligence, and enable a new generation of search engines that extract and synthesize information from text to answer complex user queries. In this talk, Oren Etzioni describes the evolution of the KnowItAll family of systems culminating in TextRunner, a program that has extracted over 1,000,000,000 'facts' from the web without breaking a sweat.
