Hakia: Taking on Google
April 12, 2009
I find these stories about search systems that will challenge Google fascinating. One of the more recent ones I saw was an April 6, 2009, article “Is Hakia.com the Search Engine That Is Going to Challenge Google?” which appeared in My Questions, a South African Web log here. The story provides a useful summary of the features of the Hakia semantic system. I ran an interview with one of the Hakia founders, Riza Berkan, in August 2008. You can read that exclusive interview here. The point that jumped out at me in the My Questions’ write up was this comment:
The results are ranked according to the relevant site and the categories that they belong to.
There is a growing interest in the authority of a source. The role that a subject matter expert, a Ph.D. committee, or a reference librarian once played has to make its ways to software. The present financial climate and the inefficiency of finding a reliable way to validate a source make human methods highly variable. Software, with its machine like consistency, seems to offer a solution. Hakia has probed this issue and includes this component in its search results ranking.
Another comment that caught my attention was:
Hakia is a very good search engine but it still has a lot of ground to cover before it can take over much of the market the Google has. We will only have to see with time how the market receives it.
I think Hakia has much to commend it. My recollection is that the company’s processing of health and medical information was quite useful. In my experience, semantic processes often work more quickly and reliably when processing content that is about a specific subject area. But technology continues to improve and some vendors, like Autonomy, emphasize that their systems can adapt to a changing flow of content. I have been around a long time, and I think that “drift” remains a challenge for many search and content processing vendors.
The effort of carpetbaggers and azure chip consultants to sell taxonomy as a silver bullet is pragmatic. With a managed list of terms or categories, the content can be put in a pigeonhole. There may be drift, but the categories act as a red herring for other indexing flaws.
With the deteriorating financial climate, many search vendors will be forced to retrench or exit the business. Each week I hear rumors about companies that are either for sale, seeking investors, or preparing to close their doors. I will have to follow up with Hakia to see if the company still wants to challenge Google.
Stephen Arnold, April 12, 2009
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