Hakia – The semantic search engine

Posted on September 5, 2008 at 5:19 am

Semantic search engines are making a buzz lately. Google, even with its own power and might of searching webpages, is one of the challenged search engines who don’t employ semantics on its rule to determine page relevance. Unlike

Google who uses page ranking algorithms to determine if your searched phrase matches a webpage, Hakia uses a semantic approach to determine if your keywords are related to a webpage even if the keywords are not in the webpage. Sound confusing? It is at first. With semantics, the search engine should be able to find related pages to the keyword by intelligently matching your keyword with related words.

If you are searching for “basketball” for example, the web pages containing “NBA”, “Michael Jordan”, “Yao Ming” or “John Stockton” should appear even if they did not mention basketball in the webpage itself.

Hakia encourages a conversational type of searching maybe to help the semantic engine determine the best match for your query. The queries should be in question form so I tried “Who is the greatest basketball player?” and it was right on the spot:

The answer is in conversational type too and it suggests a gallery for “Basketball” which is a functionality offered by it’s capability to determine the related wider topic to the question asked. The “see this page” links to NBA.com’s article with MJ.

Another feature of Hakia is that it gets snippets of the webpage and then highlighting the relevant entry for easier viewing:

Now, Hakia seems to be on the spot if asked the right question but it could easily lead to a disaster if not used properly. To demonstrate let’s try “who is the greatest drummer”:

The answer was totally not what I expected. Since it sees a poetry website with phrases containing the “The Greatest Drummer” but it was right on the category of drums and percussion.

I adjusted my query to “who is the greatest rock drummer” and then it started to make sense:

Neil Peart? Hmm, that is debatable, but since now it gives me a real drummer as an answer to “consider” then I think I could be more forgiving. I tried to ask “who is the Beatles’ drummer?” and it gave me “Pete Best“. When I tried to put the same query on Google it gave me “Ringo Starr“. I am not sure if Hakia confused the “Best” on “Pete Best” as a ranking mechanic inside its semantic algorithm to be able to give me a best answer. Obviously, there is still some to fix under the hood for cases like this.

If you want to try your own Hakia VS Google side by side comparison the click this link: http://club.hakia.com/challenge/default2.aspx?q=

You should be able to see side by side results of queries you submit:

We expect to see more from Hakia’s semantic engine. With Google’s current limitations (i.e. non-semantic searching) comes an opening for its competitors to come up with better way to do searching. Other search engines have tried to get a tiny slice of the search pie like Cuil, which recently got a lot of hype, but failed to live up to exceptations and Spock, a search engine for finding people. or Seeqpod and Songza, which are music search engines.