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Hakia.com have developed (currently still beta) a new approach to how search engines work. This is called Semantic searching {linguistics relating to meaning or the differences between meanings of words or symbols: Encarta}: The ability to understand the sentence and language used rather than analysing keywords such as traditional search engines have used allows in theory a certain level of AI. You’d ask a question and the search would answer it. It might sound a bit futuristic, but it probably will move towards this in the future. Long-tail questions rather than keyword searches are what current search engines struggle with; this is not to say Google can’t or won’t evolve its engine to be able to understand human language and return answers effectively. Ask.com is supposed to work this way, but according to Dr. Riza co-founder of Hakia.com Ask.com merely uses keyword analysis.

Hakia.com purport to have developed a sentence understand search. The algorithm is made up of two main parts:

QDEX Infrastructure:

(stands for Query Detection and Extraction) to enable semantic analysis of Web pages, and “meaning-based” search.

SemanticRank Algorithm:

SemanticRank algorithm of hakia is comprised of innovative solutions from the disciplines of Ontological Semantics (theory of meaning in natural language).

So how does this all add up to search results?

We tried a couple against Google.com:

Google Seach comparison

First round goes to Google no contest (is Google using Semantics?)

We try a couple of keywords this time rather than outright questions, although the reason behind this test is to see whether it “understands”.

Not bad, not brilliant. Starbucks isn’t anything I would have hoped for.

The results under “Profile” are way better, in fact this whole page is better if you want to know about coffee as it is organised into categories: http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=coffee

Conclusion

Hakia is still in beta and Google have the user base. OK so which is better for searching? I think it depends on what you are looking for at the moment. Off a brief rundown of some key phrase questions and keywords Google is better at analysing questions or long-tail phrases whereas Hakia for single keywords brought up some fantastic results and pictures on what we were looking for. It’s too early to say which is downright better, have a look for yourself and decide: Hakia.com What we will say though is that search does need to go towards a more intelligent model, in the future we will want to ask such questions as “Where is the nearest pub”, and get answers…