Manually querying search engines in order to accumulate a large body of factual information is a tedious, error-prone process of piecemeal search. Search engines retrieve and rank potentially relevant documents for human perusal, but do not extract facts, assess confidence, or fuse information from multiple documents. My talk introduces KnowItAll, a system that aims to automate the tedious process of extracting large collections of facts from the web in an autonomous, domain-independent, and scalable manner. I will also speculate on the long-term implications of the work for building an intelligent system that engages in "life-long" learning.