Introducing Quality Search versus Popular Search: hakia Verticals

Every Web search starts with a query. Right? Actually wrong.

Every Web search starts with two queries. One is X. The other one is “who knows X the best?” Because finding X is not enough if the author of that page does not know X himself/herself. This will immediately resonate with you if you ever searched for medical, legal, or financial information for a serious case.

This was called the “credibility” criteria in the old world-order which has progressively vanished in the new age of Internet search engines. You enter X, and get the same “popular” perspective without distinction of credibility. You may recognize some of the sources, but are you an expert yourself about these things?

Ironically, there is a science for this. It is the science of libraries and librarians. That’s their job. They know what is credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased. But how is it possible that none of the search engines today provide you a full-perspective of credibility for the given query? It is because they made their choice earlier while building their algorithms. They chose the popular view. Their result pages are doomed to have a mixed view including junk content that slips in because it is somewhat popular. Without semantics, there is no way to stop that!

With the update today, hakia is now presenting its vision of Quality Search (versus popular search). You will instantly understand what I mean by trying this query:

What are the benefits of aspirin?

We define “quality” search as the one that satisfies three criteria simultaneously. The results must (1) come from credible, trustworthy, and commercially-unbiased sources, (2) represent the most up to date information available, and (3) be relevant to the query.

hakia is now QDEXing (our process of indexing) verticals, starting from Health and Medicine. The choice of the credible sources is taken from the Medical Library Association recommendations. Results coming from these sources are clearly stamped and always positioned at the top. The user of hakia now can trust what he/she finds, because the sources are recommended by experts.

The user of hakia only needs one query in his head, not two. That’s the whole idea.

A complete list of medical sources being QDEXed can be found on our corporate site. Our BETA search engine is still not perfect and we are working on it diligently. But for most health related queries, the Quality Search is now entering our lives.

hakia will continue content acquisition in law, finance, science, and in many other content-rich verticals with the aid of librarians. If you are a librarian, please contact us for collaboration by sending an email to info@hakia.com.

        

This entry was posted on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 9:50 am and is filed under 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.