Archive for May, 2006

Ontological semantics is important, but if you ask me, another major contribution of mine to hakia.com has been the introduction and propagation of the 10g Michel Cluizel bite-size 99% cocoa-content Noir Infini chocolate squares, shown on the right in real-life dimensions. This is a real chocolate-lover chocolate, the one for the cognoscenti elite. It is pure chocolate and practically nothing else. It is an incredible energy booster, and it is going increasingly fast in the office. It is also very bitter. Now if you want candy, stay away. If you want to impress an insignificant other buy them Lady Godiva: it is twice more expensive, and it consists mostly of Chanel No. 5 – well, oversweetened Chanel No. 5. I am sure they add a little chocolate when they don’t forget – about 15%.

Michel Cluizel is all about chocolate, not any schlock additives. For those seeking real chocolate, Michel Cluizel delivers. It does not advertise much – the word of mouth (yes, mouth!) usually does the work. Its popularity grows, and a real chocolate lover, once discovering it, hardly ever goes back. It raises the expectations of a chocolate lover: they get used to the idea of getting pure chocolate in the most efficient way.

What does it have to do with hakia.com? Oh, sorry: just replace ‘chocolate’ with ‘knowledge,’ and ‘Michel Cluizel’ with ‘hakia.com’ in the paragraph above.

hakia users are sometimes asking: what is this Evolution thing? What is your page count?

Well folks, I hate to break this news but “page count” means nothing for a search engine. What is important is the knowledge count.

Let me explain with an example:

There are more than thousands of Web pages talking about the same details of Colin Powell’s United Nations speech on WMD. Now, the knowledge count, suppose we could count it like marbles, may be a few dozen points. So, what is important? The page count or the knowledge count? The knowledge count of course.

On the other hand, you could have one single Web page, like the IRS tax laws, which would have hundreds of important points. Thus, one page on the IRS Website could have more content than thousands of Web pages talking about Colin Powell’s speech. Knowledge count is the only important measurement, to show the size of the content you should expect from a search engine.

Unlike all other search engines, hakia operates at the knowledge level, and can count the knowledge points on a Web page. Therefore, we called it “The Evolution of Knowledge.”

Because no one has ever counted before the actual knowledge content of all the Web pages, it is an unknown number. The percentage that shows hakia’s progress is therefore a percentage of the estimated knowledge content on the visible Web.

The topics of the queries that are coming to hakia are also utilized in hakia’s evolution. If people are no longer asking about the Colin Powell’s speech at the UN, then we reserve our resources to analyze other, more, popular pages first. This helps prioritize what is important today to prevent information pollution of the past.

Next time you get 200,000, or more, pages from Google or Yahoo, remember to ask “What is the knowledge count?” “How polluted are these pages?” If you get an answer, please let us know!

They can meet at a hakia party! On Friday we played hard after another work week at hakia –searching for meaning.

The theme of the party was 1001 nights. Appropriately, we had middle-eastern food, gentlemen wore the fez and a belly dancer showed us how to really shake it. Most of us took the challenge and gave Crystal, the belly dancer, company (see the picture). Needless to say that everyone was in awe. After the dancing rush subsided (I manage to keep mine alive at all times), we enjoyed a live jazz session performed by Riza and Gokhan.

For those hakia friends who missed the party: see the pictures and imagine the rest of the evening! Stay tuned for the next one…