Every Wednesday on AltSearchEngines we stop by the headquarters of an Alternative Search Engine and ask the CEO for a few comments.  Today we are taking a tour of hakia.  Founded in 2004, hakia is a privately held company with headquarters in downtown Manhattan. hakia also operates globally with teams in Turkey, England, Germany, and Poland.
   Here’s a message from CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan:

You might ask, “Does the world really need a new search engine?”

Can you really find everything you need at the click of a button?

When you consider that according to a Microsoft Study, the average search takes 11 minutes, and that 50% of searches are abandoned, clearly there is room for improvement.  Recently, there were about 5.6 billion Web in one month in North America. If half did not yield relevant information, assuming even one minute per search, that’s around 47 million wasted hours in one month.  In addition, many of us are already using more than one search engine - 76% of searchers do in the UK according to a British study.

The reality is that Web search as an industry is in its infancy. One way to look at it is to compare it to the evolution of television: Search today is at about the same evolutionary point the television industry was in 1949 at the advent of black & white TV. At that time, black & white TV was amazing because our reference point was no TV at all. Then came color TV, larger screens, flat panels, HDTV and more, which have vastly increased our expectations.  In the world of Web search, it is time to raise our expectations.

The new expectation will be a search engine that understands the requirements for more relevant answers. The new expectation will be a search engine that can understand the intricacies of language. At hakia, we are on our way to making these new expectations a reality.  We’ve engineered a radical new search technology that allows users to experience improved search results with features like categorization of search results, highlighting best sentences, and complete text snippets. This new approach is based on our proprietary knowledge-gathering system, called QDEX, and a ranking algorithm, called SemanticRank.

Are we the Web’s equivalent of the first color TV? Only time will tell.

I invite you to try hakia. You’ll start to see search in a whole new light. 

Here are some of the features that we offer:

Galleries:
For short queries such as cancer or Winston Churchill, hakia presents search results in a categorized format to provide meaningful variations of the subject. Each gallery has 10 categories on the average, that is equal to running 10 queries in conventional search engines.

Relevancy:
Although the development is in progress, hakia already shows superior capability to handle long-tail (complex) queries via its semantic capabilities. Try what is Palladium useful for? Popularity based search engines may bring results like the London Palladium to this query.

Richness:
Although the development is in progress, hakia is able to bring search results of the equivalent meanings of the search terms. For example, what is the latest bill George Bush killed in the senate will bring results including the word VETO, which is the correct interpretation of the search term “kill”. This capability continues to improve in parallel with hakia’s progress.

Freshness:
Dynamic pages, like news, often create problems for the popularity based search engines, because there is never enough time to collect statistics. With its semantic capabilities, hakia can analyze and retrieve search results from dynamic pages without a compromise.

Highlighting:
For complex and longer queries, hakia highlights relevant phrases or sentences that best correspond to the meaning match of your query. Try Why did Enron collapse? You do not have to open the documents to see the quality of the results - a key to saving your time!

Complete Text:
hakia often displays uninterrupted sections of Web pages in search results that provide a full point of view of the content. Presenting complete snippets enables you to evaluate the search results instantly and saves you significant search time.

Dialogue:
hakia points out good answers in a dialogue mode in addition to making suggestions, correcting spelling errors, and listing related hakia Galleries. This hakia capability continues to evolve. Try What is the most common type of volcano?

Privacy Friendly:
hakia has no interest in who you are and where you live. Neither our technology nor our business model relies on this information. Thus, hakia is not engaged in any practice that may compromise your privacy.

And don’t forget to try the new hakia ScoopBar!

Editor’s note: hakia is a sponsor of AltSearchEngines.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 6:57 pm and is filed under CEO Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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