Hakia - First Meaning-based Search Engine
Read/Write Web have recently covered the Hakia search engine as the first in a series of articles about a new wave of search engines. The article begins:
” There has been a lot of talk lately about 2007 being the year when we will see companies roll out Semantic Web technologies.The wave started with John Markoff’s article in NY Times and got picked up by Dan Farber of ZDNet and in other media. For background on the Semantic Web in this era, check out our post entitled The Road to the semantic Web. Also for a lengthy, but very insightful, primer on Semantic Web see NovaSpivak’s recent article.”
Through the digg article where I found out about Hakia I also learned of another search engine called Clusty. Both of these search engines Hakia and Clusty provide a slightly different take on what Google provide. Google’s search algorithm is, frankly, the best out there at the moment. Although Windows Live seems to index and prioritise more recent articles better. Robert Scoble highlights this in his comments in this WSJ article. I threw a variety of questions at Hakia, ranging from what is the answer to life, the Universe and everything?, who or what is menori?, and how many women does it take to change a lightbulb? [interestingly Hakia suggested this page as the top result]. Where Hakia likes to try to answer questions posed to it (something that AskJeeves decided to stop doing years ago) Clusty simply returns your results and clusters them by web page, blog, topic etc. A nice newer feature of Clusty is the ‘Clusty Cloud‘ which is a kind of tag cloud concept based upon a search for a particular term. A Clusty Cloud for menori returned the following:
Fascinating stuff as the cloud appears to be based upon the volume of mentions of menori. So, understandably ‘blog’ is the most popular as the word appears in almost every posting because the permalink title has the word blog in it.
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