This week I spoke to Hakia
founder and CEO Dr. Riza C. Berkan and COO Melek Pulatkonak. Hakia is
one of the more promising
Alt Search Engines around, with a focus on natural language
processing methods to try and deliver 'meaningful' search results. Alex
Iskold
profiled Hakia for R/WW at the beginning of December and he
concluded, after a number of search experiments, that Hakia was
intriguing - but it was not a level to compete with Google yet. It is
important to note that Hakia is a relatively early beta product and is
still in development. But given the speed of Internet time, 3.5 months
is probably a good time to check back and see how Hakia is progressing...
What is Hakia?
Riza and Melek firstly told me what makes Hakia different from
Google. Hakia attempts to analyze the concept of a search query, in
particular by doing sentence analysis. Most other major search
engines, including Google, analyze keywords. Riza and Melek told
me that the future of search engines will go beyond keyword analysis -
search engines will talk back to you and in effect become your search
assistant.
One point worth noting here is that, currently, Hakia still has some
human post-editing going on - so it isn't 100% computer powered at this
point.
1) QDEX Infrastructure (which stands for Query Detection and
Extraction) - this does the heavy lifting of analyzing search queries
at a sentence level.
2) SemanticRank Algorithm - this is essentially the science they use,
made up of ontological semantics that relate concepts to each other.
If you're interested in the tech aspects, also check out
hakia-Lab
- which features their latest technology R&D.
How is Hakia different from Ask.com?
Hakia most reminds me of Ask.com, which uses more a natural language
approach than the other big search engines ('ask' a question, get an
answer) - and also Ask.com uses human editing too, as with Hakia. [I
interviewed Ask.com back in November]. So I asked Riza and Melek
what is the difference between Hakia and Ask.com?
Riza told me that Ask.com is an indexing search engine and it
has no semantic analysis. Going one step below, he says to look at the
basis of their results. Ask.com bolds keywords (i.e. it works at a
keywords level), whereas Riza said that Hakia understands the sentence.
He also said that Ask.com categories are not meaning-based - they are "canned
or prefixed". Hakia, he said, understands the semantic relationships.
Hakia vs Google
I next referred Riza and Melek to
Read/WriteWeb's interview with Matt Cutts of Google, in which Matt
told me that Google is essentially already using semantic technologies,
because the sheer amount of data that Google has "really does help us
understand the meanings of words and synonyms". Riza's view on that is
that Google works with popularity algorithms and so it can "never have
enough statistical material to handle the Long Tail". He says a search
engine has to understand the language, in order to properly serve the
Long Tail.
Moreover, Hakia's view is that the vastness of data that Google has
doesn't solve the semantic problem - Riza and Melek think there
needs to be that semantic connection present.
Their bigger claim though is that the big search companies are still
thinking within an indexing framework (personalization etc).
Hakia thinks that indexing has plateaued and that semantic technologies
will take over for the next generation of search. They say that
semantic technologies allow you to analyze content, which they think is
'outside the box' of what the big search companies are doing. Riza
admitted that it was possible Google was investigating semantic
technologies, behind closed doors. Nevertheless, he was adamant that the
future is understanding info, not merely finding it - which he
said is a very difficult problem to solve, but it's Hakia's mission.
Semantic web and Tim Berners-Lee
Throughout the interview, I noticed the word "semantic" was being
used a lot - but their interpretation seemed to be different to that of
Tim Berners-Lee, whose notion of a Semantic Web is generally what Web
people think about when uttering the 'S' word. Riza confirmed that their
concept of semantic technology is indeed different. He said that Tim
Berners-Lee is banking on certain standards being accepted by web
authors and writers - which Riza said is "such a big assumption to start
this technology". He said that it forces people to be linguists, which
is not a common skill.
Furthermore, Riza told me that Berners-Lee's Semantic Web is about
"imposing a structure that assumes people will obey [and] follow". He
said that the "entire Semantic Web concept relies on utilizing semantic
tagging, or labeling, which requires people to know it." Hakia, he said,
doesn't depend on such structures. Hakia is all about analyzing the
normal language of people - so a web author "doesn't need to mess
with that".
Competitors
Apart from Google and the other big 'indexing' search engines, Hakia
is competing against other semantic search engines like
Powerset
and hybrids like Wikia.
Perhaps also
Freebase
- although Riza thinks the latter may be "old semantic web" (but he says
there's not enough information about it to say for sure).
Conclusion
Hakia plans to launch its version 1.0 (i.e. get out of beta) by the
end of 2007. As of now my assessment is the same as Alex's was in
December - it's a very promising, but as yet largely unproven,
technology.
I also suspect that Google is much more advanced in search technology
than Mountain View is letting on. We know that Google's scale is a huge
advantage, but their experiments with things like personalization and
structured data (Google Base) show me that Google is also well aware of
the need to implement next-generation search technologies. Also, as Riza
noted during the interview, who knows what Google is doing behind closed
doors.
Will semantic technologies and 'sentence analysis' be the next wave
of search? It seems very plausible. So with a bit more development,
Hakia could well become compelling to a mass market. Therefore how and
when Google responds to Hakia will be something to watch carefully.
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