Hakia.com is a somewhat new search engine that delivers search results in a different way. Hakia gives search results by what it calls “Semantic Search Results”. What is Semantic Search on the web? Semantic search is the process of searching for content on the World Wide Web and giving results in a form that can be more useful, easier to understand and interpret to the person who searches the vast ocean of internet. In short the search results given by such a technology can be more meaningful and relevant to the question asked. Obviously this involves the application of more advanced technologies. Hakia is the first web search engine that works in this manner – A semantic search engine that supposedly gives more meaningful answers.

I tried searching on Hakia with this query: “What is the population of Mumbai?” Hakia gave the exact answer in the first result. No doubt Google also gave the exact answer. When I just searched only for the word “Mumbai” Hakia gave this result: “Hakia Gallery for Mumbai India” which had the following contents under separate heads:

City Profile

How To Get There

Local Transportation

Main Attractions

Neighborhoods and Regions

Hotel Guides

Restaurant Guides

Nightlife Guides

Shopping

City Parks

Traveler’s Forum

Weather

Photographs

Local Media

Maps

Each of the above heads under “Hakia Gallery for Mumbai, India” has 2 to 3 URL’s with meaningful results. It is believed that this kind of search result categorization under various heads makes it easier to find the information you want. Semantic search gives more importance on a site’s keywords, keyword variations, page titles, Meta tags and URLS.

Secondly, Hakia also highlighted in “yellow” all the results wherever the words “population of Mumbai” appeared. This makes it useful to pin point what you are looking for. I found this useful.

I do not know the future of semantic search and whether Hakia is a better option than Google when it comes to searching for information on the web, but the idea of Hakia trying to interpret the subtle differences and meanings is an effort in the right direction. Hakia of course cannot be better than Google as of now. Hakia is currently in Beta.

Try Hakia. You may like it. Let’s wait and watch how popular Hakia becomes.

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