Sunday 5 October 2008

Is Hakia the answer?

The search engine Hakia has been around a few years but only now has it become developed enough for serious consideration. It claims to be the Semantic search engine dedicated to quality.
"Today's search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods. Popular results are not always quality results, and the searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information."
Results on Hakia are based on sentence analysis rather than keywords (e.g. Google). You can enter a question, phrase or keywords.
On Sept.22, 2008 – Hakia put out "an open call to librarians and information professionals to participate in a new program to unlock credible and free Web resources to Web searchers.
Librarians and information professionals can suggest URLs leading to the most credible Websites on a given topic. Hakia will process the sites with its proprietary QDEX (Query Detection and Extraction) technology and make them available to Web searchers in credibility-stamped search results. Each month hakia will give away thank-you prizes, ranging from a book donation to two conference grants, to participants. "

Haven't had time to try it out much, but initial impression is that it's an interesting alternative to Google, especially as accoona has just folded. Could it be used with students on topics getting them to search Google and hakia and comparing their results? Maybe I'll try that.

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