About hakia’s Market Positioning

Yesterday, there were several blog postings mentioning our technology licensing initiative like the one in Venturebeat blog. We thank everyone for carrying on our message quite accurately.

However, we need to make one small correction to misunderstandings that appear here and there: Are we a Google killer? Are we competing with Google-esque search engines? Are we a specific application search engine?

hakia is a general purpose “semantic” search engine whereas Google-esque are general purpose “statistical” search engines. As a semantic search engine, hakia is being developed to fulfill different needs of a different type of on-line searchers. These differences refer to potential benefits (yet not fully realized) within the boundaries of “general purpose” utility. If it sounds confusing I would’t blame you.

Let me throw an example. If the user enters the query “benefits of aspirin”, Google-esque search engines will rank results by popular opinion (via link referrals). Popular opions are formed by millions of ordinary people rather than by a small group of the designers of the drug at Bayer. Therefore, there is no alternative view available on the Web today, alternative being a different criteria, different perspective, perhaps the perspective of credibility, freshness, applicability, feasibility, depth, and so forth.

If you were going to take aspirin and wondering about the benefits of it, versus you may have a weak heart, versus you might be a genetics researcher. Again, depending on who you are, the perspective of ranking search results can vary. Using Google-esque search engines, we are always seeing one fixed perspective. hakia is about to enrich this experience.

For the reasons I am trying to explain, hakia’s competitive position is undefined, and hakia’s promise is not built on competing for the same turf with others. Note that other semantic search start-ups are saying similar things, thus there is an independently formed concensus about it: Semantic technologies will bring out something new about the Web that is hard to place in any competitive scale.

If we have to compare ourselves to others, we can proudly say that we have taken the long road of building a sound core-technology (still continuing). Our latest technology licensing initiative is the natural outcome of this process. You might ask what kind of core-technology initiatives are coming out of them. Or does it really matter?

Beyond technology licensing, we will offer semantic technology by various channels ranging from syndication services to APIs. We believe semantic technologies will float underneath every Web interaction, and that’s the focus which defines our current state of mind in the best way.

        

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under News, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.