Hakia Promises Meaning-Based Search - Hakia's Background
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Hakia was founded in 2004 by Dr. Riza Berkan, a nuclear scientist who worked for the U.S. government for 10 years. His major focus was on the safeguarding of information. Serving at the helm of a new search engine suits his specializations in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. Dr. Berkan was joined in founding hakia by Dr. Pentti Kouri (also mentioned as an investor), an economist and venture capitalist. Hakia also boasts a prominent scientific adviser: Victor Raskin, described by the company as "a father of ontological semantics and a noted international authority in the field of computational linguistics."
What this means, in short, is that there is a lot of brain power dedicated to making hakia work. In addition to the C-level names, there are 20 programmers working on the system in New York, and another 20 working remotely from various locations worldwide, including Turkey, Armenia, Russia, Germany, and Poland. All of these people are in search of one thing: meaning.
To be more specific, let's look at hakia's web site. On the "About Us" page the company explains that its "basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain's cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms. Hakia's new technology is a radical departure from the conventional indexing approach, because indexing has severe limitations to handle full-scale semantic search."
So that implies a significant difference in hakia's algorithm, to say the least. How do you get a machine to understand a complicated query when it's tricky enough getting a search engine to tell the difference between bass fishing and bass guitars? Hakia uses a system it calls QDEX (stands for Query Detection and Extraction). QDEX analyzes web pages and breaks them down into something hakia calls "knowledge bits," which it stores as "gateways to all possible queries one can ask."
If that leaves you scratching your head a bit, don't worry; it left me a bit puzzled too. What exactly is a "knowledge bit?" (I did in fact ask hakia's search engine that question, with interesting results, which I'll share later). Putting aside the software for the moment, hakia's hardware includes "a distributed network of fast servers using a mosaic-like structure." The company isn't too worried about the scalability of its system, either, because "data segments are independent of each other."
Hakia sounds impressive. It is trying to bring about search based on the actual meaning of content rather than keywords. But how well does it work?
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