New Search Experience at Hakia

With today’s update at hakia.com, we are coming out of a period of silence during which we made several updates to our offerings on the Web and in enterprise search.

We worked on two elements of progress: (1) automation and (2) relevancy. In both cases, semantic technology is the enabler.

On the automation front, the new hakia.com brings 10 full sets of search results with a single click. You can see the quick progress as the segments come in. These search result segments include Web, Galleries, Credible sources, Pubmed, News, Blogs, Twitter, Wikipedia, Images, and Videos. (Twitter and Wikipedia will be available next week.)

Instead of displaying blurbs from such segments, which is a common practice today, we thought the user should have the full result set in one click, available to him/her for each search.

Although the process of displaying 10 segments may look slow, it is faster than doing 10 searches seperately using any search engine. Furthermore, the increased bandwidth and faster CPUs will make this step instantaneous in the near future.

For those minimalists, the SERP has accordion buttons (little triangles). You can chose what to view and what to hide by opening or closing the segments, as shown below. Your preferences are remembered next time you search, or visit hakia.com.

We believe that the future of search will shift from the domination of a single recepie to the presentation of different segments, almost like restaurants having different menus. Automation is the key for progress in this direction.

On the relevancy front, the relevancy of search results is elevated via our semantic technology at various levels depending on the segment. While Galleries have the highest level of semantic treatment, Credible, Pubmed, News, and Blogs have moderate levels of semantic treatment. All these segments are QDEXed content. The remaining segments receive light level of semantic treatment, mostly on-the-fly, via our SemanticRank algorithm.

At hakia, we are also working on exciting real-time and enterprise search products where the impact of semantic technology is most visible. Stay tuned and expect related announcements in coming weeks.

        

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 3:06 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.