Archive for February, 2007

As an old Turkish proverb says “every challenger has his/her own way of eating yogurt” we, at hakia, took the path of taking baby steps towards the completion of our search engine. Yesterday, we have released a new version of hakia.com, BETA 13, and yes we are not superstitious!

Among the many advances and improvements went into this release, the highlights include (1) extended coverage of galleries, (2) enhancements of the gallery format, (3) spell checker, (4) improvements on SemanticRank algorithm, (5) addition of more QDEX data, (6) new syndications, and most visibly, (7) the advertisements. More detailed announcements will be made in the coming days.

Back to the question of why we are taking small steps and exposing them to our users is simple. We listen! We are lucky to have a contributing user community who are making excellent suggestions ranging from small details to philosophical comments. At every step of the way, we consider what has been suggested. We believe this is a healthy path to develop a new search engine that is radically better.

For those who are asking where we stand in our development, the best way to answer is to point to the version number. hakia has a 20-step development plan, and we are at number 13. The rest of the steps will be taken in 2007. Despite our short history of development, hakia’s performance has been very promising and several benefits have already been pointed out in our user surveys. We are as happy as a clown. Keep searching for meaning!

In the year 2000, who needed an iPod? The thought of 6,000 songs, or video in the palm of our hands was unimaginable. So, in 2007, do we need a better search engine? Most of us cannot imagine something better. The fact is, we did not know we wanted an iPod, until we saw it.

Today, when we think of a search engine, we think of Google, Yahoo, and others who provide the users pretty much the same quality results in a similar format. Most importantly, we think of “keywords,” and in some rare cases, advanced ways of manipulating search queries. We think of search spam, we think of number of pages indexed, we think of popularity algorithms, we think of biased results via advertising, we think of number of results to the tune of “2,000,000 results for your query.”

In this picture of the “world of search engines,” it is quite expected that no one would be able to fit advanced science and technology just as what Google technologists have declared. Trying some natural language processing (NLP) has shown no difference in Google experiments. Well…

Like the iPod example, if we don’t think in a new dimension, there is no way to imagine the new thing. Same with the search engines. To imagine what a next generation search engine will look like, and will be able to do, we have to abandon the habit of looking to the ground we are standing on, and turn our heads to the sky.

There are significant positive developments in the search industry these days and people are turning their heads to the sky. I congratulate companies like Powerset which is taking on this new challenge, as we are at hakia. The next two years will become a historical period if our visions are correct, and every step we take will be watched by industry leaders like Danny Sullivan. When the world sees the new technology of search, then, and only then, will they know what they are missing. These are exciting times!

Another wave of information is coming in, every millisecond of the day, flooding the four corners of the internet in megapixels and macrobits. As global villagers racing headlong into the new millennium, we have to contend with all sorts of miscellany posted throughout the web: from 30-second video clips of 10-minute abs, to an endless disarray of pop-up ads, all interrupted by the constant blips and bleeps of truncated text-messages on our cell-phones, blackberries, palm pilots, and computers. And all this begs the question: doesn’t anybody stop to smell the flowers anymore?!

The fact of the matter is the old dust-ridden libraries and card-catalogues don’t cut it anymore, and traditional thinking and means of collecting data only go so far. But whereas that antiquated thinking used to posit the idea that any new innovation would only serve to shorten our attention span or facilitate our laziness – silly things: like television, and automobiles – the truth is, we have become even more adept and nimble beings, striving to process and understand the meaning behind this virtually insane influx of stuff. Juggling all those handheld devices, while jogging on a treadmill and jabbering on a cell-phone (all on our coffee break), the human brain has proved itself as the world’s most ingenuous CPU of all.

One outcome of this rapid-fire inundation, however, is that all kinds of valuable information can sometimes fall through the cracks or get lost in endless search engine results. What we are developing now at hakia will dig up not only what may have needlessly fallen by the side of the road along this information superhighway (yes, I said it), but anything and everything that you ever wanted to know about what you were searching for in the first place. Perhaps you were wondering what is the meaning of life? – or, even the answer to a slightly more detailed enquiry, say, on what it means to cross the Rubicon. Well, as we make our way into uncharted Internet search, we are working to go beyond that very chasm of the old techniques to find the true meaning of your journey.