hakia Offers a New Way of Searching:Venture Beyond 10 Blue Links

Many of you may have noticed a significant difference when you visited hakia.com today. Through the launch of our new site, we are pleased to announce that we now offer a new, focused search experience.

For starters, we would like to share with you the philosophy behind this change. We have said this over and over again: we are dedicated to provide a quality search experience. To achieve this goal, our team aspires to establish a new standard of focus, clarity and credibility in Web search.

Web search beyond 10 blue links is the innovation aspiration of the search industry. On one hand, Google leads the way in popularity methods to better understand the user intent to take search beyond 10 blue links. This popularity driven or statistical approach doesn’t make the distinction of what is a credible (or quality) Web site or not. Furthermore, there is no focus on understanding Web page content with natural language analysis. Lastly, we do not observe categorization of search results based on the meaning of the query.

hakia wants to lead in a different way. We have introduced a transparent definition of “credible Web sites” and the first-ever search experience to find clearly marked search results from credible sites by librarians’ contributions. As Tim Berners-Lee recently stated at the launch of his Web Foundation, Web became a platform for misinformation and there is a growing need to label trusted sites. Since April, hakia has been the first search engine to implement this vision it jointly shares with Tim Berners-Lee. Furthermore, our QDEX system processes Web pages to anticipate meaningful questions and queries that can be asked to a Web page with semantic analysis. Lastly, hakia Galleries categorize search results based on the meaning of a query. Here is an example:

Now, we invite you to try hakia.com. For example, search for “shoulder injury“. Compare this search result with that of Google’s undifferentiated 1.4 million search results. You will notice:

– hakia introduces a new, focused search experience. For any given query, the first tab “All Results” provides a three-column overview of the Web results, including results from hakia Credible Sites, images and news, if available. The advertisements are clearly marked in the far right column. Searchers can now enjoy a clutter free, clearly marked and organized start to find more.

– hakia offers dedicated search results from Credible Sites – sites vetted by librarians and informational professionals. hakia is the first search engine to incorporate librarians’ collective knowledge of the Web to guide searchers to Credible Sites. Currently, hakia’s credible site coverage is in health, medical and environmental topics. We are expanding our coverage by engaging information professionals in credible site collection development at http://club.hakia.com/lib/

–In the navigation bar you will notice a link to “Galleries.” Now searchers can surf the highly-appraised hakia Galleries. hakia Galleries intuitively organize the search results into relevant categories, enabling users to scroll down to the category that is most relevant to their interests and begin their search there as opposed to having to wade through pages and pages of unorganized “10 blue links” from other search engines. For example, a search for “Madonna” will categorize results in areas such as images, headlines, discography, blogs and fan sites, lyrics, myths and controversies and more.

This is how the screen looks:

We ask you to try the new hakia and tell us what you think! We will give you more insights about our new customization tool, “my hakia,” in a separate post. Stay tuned.

        

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 9:25 am 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.