Hakia Binged
July 12, 2009
A couple of weeks ago I heard a discussion about “who’s on first”. The talk was not about the Abbott & Costello comedy routine. The discussion concerned who invented categorized search first. AltSearchEngines.com has a story by Melek Pulatkonak, the chief operating officer of Hakia, a semantic technology company. The article “Inspired by Hakia, Bing Introduces Categorized Search” is interesting. Ms. Pulatkonak wrote:
Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft just went live and in doing so introduced a similar version of Hakia’s categorized search. At its launch in 2006, Hakia became the first search engine to provide categorized aspects of search queries via Hakia Galleries. Hakia Galleries received industry accolades after their formal introduction in 2007. Our goal has always been to take search beyond 10 blue links. It was then no surprise when Microsoft invited us to show them the inner workings of the Hakia Galleries in July 2008- shortly after their acquisition of Powerset. But it was a huge surprise to recently find out that Microsoft introduced categorized search in Bing. Today we checked out the Bing preview and compared the Bing’s categorized search feature to its inspiration, Hakia Galleries.
What struck me as interesting is that this type of development in search is part of the “thermonuclear escalation” in which vendors engage. One vendor comes up with a new twist; for example, Endeca and Guided Navigation. Then many vendors offer similar features. Few of the people with whom I interact know where an idea originated. If the idea has utility, then that twist can be implemented in another vendor’s search system. The bandwagon effect is remarkable. Universal search, federation, date sorting, and other basic functions today began as a tough problem solved by someone somewhere. Most of the engineers working on search today don’t dig back to the roots of SDC Orbit to find out how tags worked in the late 1970s.
Is search better because of these rich functions? In my experience, the rich functions are eliminating the need to understand the content of a collection, how Boolean logic works, and the value of a controlled vocabulary. I applaud those who find a new angle. I am amazed at how quickly innovations diffuse in the search space and then become a standard function.
The one problem is that dissatisfaction with search continues to poke its nose into the rosiest of user studies. Whatever is going on has produced a couple of points that are tough to ignore:
- Figuring out who is first is probably a matter for lawyers to decide. Good luck with that. Those folks are not up on algorithms in my experience.
- Users are still dissatisfied. Better from the developers point of view continues to leave 50 to 65 percent of the users dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with search systems
- Innovation, while moving quickly to some, is not going all that fast in my opinion. There has not been a significant breakthrough in search since the Google poked its nose from the Stanford dorm.
Search is a tough, often thankless business. I like the Hakia technology, but what can you do when a giant corporation goes in the same direction? See today’s mini case about Convera to get a sense of the difficulties search puts in the way of investors and managers. Repeating: search is a tough, complex business. Some azure chip consultants say otherwise, but those folks are wrong.
Stephen Arnold, July 12, 2009
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