Blank (Media) Slate

I found an interesting new (beta launched 2/13/2007) search engine called hakia. From the looks of it, they’re rolling their own solution on semantic-based stuff. Here’s a blurb from their site:

The 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.

Interestingly, they purposefully call out specific uses in which they believe their solution is particularly well-suited:

hakia’s capabilities will appeal to all Web searchers - especially those engaged in research on knowledge intensive subjects, such as medicine, law, finance, science, and literature.

I hammered on it for a bit, and it does look like it’s got some good feet under it. I’ll try replacing it as my go-to search site for a while and see how it goes (similar to what I did with AltaVista when I found Google in 1997 - never to look back). More on the experiment - if it develops.

I turned up a short counter-point blog post about their approach by Marc Fawzi and ToxicWave:

“We are beginning to see search engines that claim they can semantic-ize arbitrary unstructured “Wild Wild Web” information. Wikipedia pages, constrained to the Wikipedia knowledge management format, may be easier to semantic-ize on the fly. However, at this early stage, a better approach may be to use human-directed crawling that associates the information sources with clearly defined domains/ontologies.”

I like that idea… at least until the machines are smart enough to push aside their masters (as anyone who reads science fiction knows they’ll do eventually).