readwriteweb.com — Hakia, which is a "meaning-based" search engine startup getting a bit of buzz. It is a venture-backed, multi-national team company headquartered in New York - and curiously has former US senator Bill Bradley as a board member. It launched its beta in early November this year, but already ranks around 33K on Alexa - which is impressive.
Dec 8, 2006 View in Crawl 4
jatenateDec 8, 2006
Try entering "What is the square root of 16"
022aDec 8, 2006
"What was the Y2K bug?"Both sites have several explanations on the first page. Google's First result is Hakia's 3rd result. Google provides more sources but both effectively answer the question. How does that equate to horrible?I think a lot of the distaste people posting here seem to have comes from Google's Page Rank. People looking to find faults probably notice the *lack* of popular, familar results more readily than quality of the results that *are* returned.
mojiraDec 9, 2006
I think I asked it the hardest question: What is the meaning of life?<a class="user" href="http://hakia.com/search.aspx?q=what+is+the+meaning+of+life">http://hakia.com/search.aspx?q=what+is+the+meaning+of+life</a>
dabreakaDec 9, 2006
i hate when everyone is promoting google and refusing everything else..not that this is something great, but.. dont bow down to google!
1021Dec 9, 2006
@paulHakia is Web 3.0 because it is using the Semantic Web!!! For the billionth time, Web 3.0 was defined to be the semantic web by the founder of the WWW himself.
elbowgeekDec 10, 2006
Interesting. Maybe we're working towards a system which is almost fully human in terms of intelligence, and perhaps becomes sentient. Sounds like science fiction, but I believe it will eventually come to pass.
sanguinemoonDec 10, 2006
That day is still in the future. The more I mess with the site, the less I'm convinced it's really doing any analysing of the meaning of the search. Consider this search:<a class="user" href="http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=I+need+a+linux+support+site">http://www.hakia.com/search.aspx?q=I+need+a+linux+support+site</a>This all this searching by "What is the ......." the user can reasonably believe that he can just enter a natural language search like this.Google gives better results just by doing a tradional search:<a class="user" href="http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=linux+support+site&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8">http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=linux+support+site&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8</a>Ultimately the quality of the results, not the method in which theyre obtained wins the day. I wish Hakia well and the site is still beta, so we'll see what the future brings