Hakia: A New Google?

January 3, 2007 from E-Business News – Google entrenched itself deeper in our lives in 2006, but the success of the world's most popular search engine is attracting early-stage competitors in the New Year. One of these competitors is Hakia, whose search engine I tested out recently.

The Hakia premise, summed up in a company blog entry by software developer Chris Gates, is that "We are just now entering the phase of search with engines that understand 'what you mean' not just what or how you say it." Gates is referring to search engines with semantic (context) over and above syntactic (contextless keywords) capabilities.

For example, Gates suggests typing in "what drug treats headache" into another search engine. I ran the search on Google and got the following hits:

• Lower Cervical Bupivacaine Injection Treats Headache in the ED
• IngentaConnect Dexamethasone/amitriptyline treats drug-induced ...

As you can see, it wasn't a helpful set of results. The tacit question behind my query (what can I take for my headache?) went completely unanswered, as Google relied on the syntactic recurrence of keywords rather than deducing my semantic meaning. As a result, I didn't get a single relevant hit.

I repeated the search on Hakia and, right at the top of the page, Hakia told me: "The following should help: By reducing the amount of prostaglandin available for synthesis, paracetamol helps relieve headache pain by reducing the dilation of the blood vessels that cause the pain." There was a link to a specific page about headache pain, as well as to a Hakia gallery of prescription drugs.

The hits that followed this helpful top-line explanation were much more relevant to the issue of headache pain than Google's hits. Hakia's hits told me more about aspirin, nurofen, barbiturates, and even techniques like "sleep, darkness, or a quiet room…"

180 View – Even though 180 Systems does not show up on top of Hakia for keyword searches such as “ERP comparison”, we can see that it does offer a good alternative to Google if you’re getting nowhere in your Google search.