Search Engine of the Month - Hakia.com

01/11/2007

This month we feature Hakia.com as our smaller search engine. Hakia is based on semantic search and their focus is to produce results on a meaning match (similar to the brain's cognitive function) rather than by the indexation or associative factors that most other search engines use. Whilst semantic search is not new, it is considered the holy grail of search, as assigning results based on meaning would deliver a user experience richer than anything else that is being experienced presently.

It produces some interesting results for broad based information searches. It also really tries hard to work out what it is you are after by offering a wide range of information subsections. I typed in a search for dolphins and compared the results head to head with Google, Live, Ask and Yahoo! The results on Hakia.com were different to the bigger engines and what I liked was the fact that it focused on one meaning (the animal) but gave an option at the top of the page to go to the NFL team. Personally I prefer this to Google's hit and miss results which produced mixed listings on the same page - once I clicked on the Miami Dolphins choice, I was presented with a full page of information listings about the team.

Hakia uses a search infrastructure system called QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) as well as an algorithm known as SemanticRank. Whilst the engine is still in beta, it does go further in providing deep and more information-rich results than the other engines. Hopefully we will see more from them in the future.

Back to i-level Search News November 2007