He is now building a company called Factual, which he hopes will be one of the world's largest and most accurate repositories of facts.
Factual, which rose by 2% between 2010 and 2011, was the only other category in which year-on-year spending increased.
Factual, which now has 50 employees, could prove immensely valuable as this world grows and these databases begin to interact.
Factual, which is an open database wiki, just added some tools to help visualize the data entered on the site.
Gil is now building another extraordinary technical team at Factual, which is leading a new revolution around data as service.
But Factual, which is backed by more than $25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Index, GRP, SV Angel and others has the resources to go up against the bigger players.
Later today, he will be launching Factual, which he describes as "a platform for anyone to share and mash open data".
Data Marketplace is similar in some ways to Factual, which is a Wikipedia-like site for open data, and InfoChimps, which takes a more collaborative approach to open data.
And so, for me, the difficult judgment was not about the factual information, which I was convinced was accurate.
The factual sections, which draw hungrily on scores of academic and more popular sources, are sometimes deftly integrated into the story, and sometimes not.
