Good for you, Hakia. Don't try to beat Google at its own game. Make your own rules instead. Collaborate with librarians. Hakia has cleverly retooled its Web site. How did they do it? By adding tabs for news, images and librarian-recommended site searches as a way to differentiate between its search approach and what it calls the "10 blue links" approach search incumbents Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. In employing semantic search technologies, leveraging natural language processing to derive broader meaning from search queries.The new user interface shows tabs for all results, images and news, as well as one for the company's existing Meet Others social network. This feature puts visitors in touch with others searching for the same or similar information. Users can e-mail each other through this feature.
So Hakia differentiates itself through having credible sites vetted by information professionals. What's the difference between Google? Hakia believes Google search results are undifferentiated, meaning they have less value because, unlike with Hakia credible sites, the reader doesn't immediately know which sites to trust or ignore. In other words, Hakia adds a human element to its game, while continuing to refine its semantic ingredients. If there is one suggestion I'd make, it would be to include a multilingual element, too. So far, there hasn't been one engine that has done an adequate job.
