Hakia Promises Meaning-Based Search - The Acid Test?
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It's easy to find hakia's web site. Just point your browser to http://www.hakia.com. You'll see a web site with a very clean interface (for which we can thank Google as the trendsetter):
As you can see, it's still in beta. Its blog has been around since February, in case you were wondering. It's a nice place to check out if you're curious about hakia's special features; if you want to see them in a more organized fashion, click on About Us and then Benefits. Or you could just try out the examples:
Let's take a look at short queries. It's nice to be able to ask questions, but a lot of us are used to putting in keywords these days. So let's ask about Orlando Bloom. What do you get? To the right of your results, you get a nice image that is linked to celebopedia.com. The results themselves are divided into "galleries." These have headings that include Biography and Timeline, Awards and Accomplishments, Filmography, Television and Radio, Speeches and Quotes, and much more. You get anywhere from three to five links under each gallery.
What if you have a more complicated question? How can you tell whether a link will be useful? Let's try that Enron question.
Here you see two things. First, hakia does a good job of highlighting text that is relevant to your question - the whole text, not just your keywords. Second, the search engine makes a suggestion as to the most useful document, and lets you click on a link that takes you there quickly. Hakia calls this its virtual assistant (and I'd rather have that kind of virtual assistant than Microsoft's paper clip any day). Sometimes the assistant seems to get involved in what you're doing. When I used the sample question "how many people died in Iraq," it enthusiastically replied "You are working like a detective! Here is a good lead:..." and it pointed me to two links.
So, what happens when I ask hakia about its own technology? Well, I tried to ask it about knowledge bits. Here are the results I got:
Do you notice that each item includes "knowledge" and "bit," but not exactly in the way I intended? It looks as if hakia has fallen back on trying to find the keywords and matching them to the query. I want to emphasize that hakia is in beta, so I'm not going to take them to task for this.
I'd also like to point out that the way you phrase a question in this search engine makes a really big difference, even if the meaning is similar. The queries "What is the earliest known reference to juggling?" and "How old is juggling?" yield very different results. For the former, the very first result was relevant, but the rest of the results seemed to focus on the phrase "the earliest known reference to..." For the latter, hakia returned results pertaining to the age of the juggler, and "age-related juggling" (juggling glass eyes, bifocals, etc).
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