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Search Box: Keep Your Curious Visitors on SiteJanuary 6

With the start of 2009, we have just released a new and improved version of hakia Search Box. To see how it works, go to Search Box Page.

One immediate distinguishing feature of hakia Search Box is its flexibility to search in multiple domains as shown below.

The second distinguishing feature is its sentence highlighting and semantic precision (especially with complex, long-tail, and unusual queries) as shown below. Note the uninterrupted text snippets (no ellipses) for Pubmed and health searches.

There are several ASP and PHP examples on the page with design options as outlined below:

- Web Plus Search (multiple domains as shown above)
- Site search (pick a site to search only its content)
- Pubmed search (search results from 10 million pubmed articles)
- Health search (search results from credible Web sources on health)

It is free up to 30,000 searches per day (which is the highest number offered to date).

Why do you need a good search box on your site? Well, you don’t want those curious visitors to le

Make Your Own Digital NewspaperDecember 23 2008

Before entering the holidays, one may wish that the news we get everyday were somehow customized to our interests. For example, “I am not really interested in Baseball, or I like Jazz news to appear in my first glance view, or I need to monitor emerging progress about synthetic insulin, or…” People can have variety of first-grade interests, but they have to collect these information from different places everyday, or through clicking bunch of links. Why not have my own newspaper where every column is about my selected interest, laid out in the way I want?

We built my.hakia.com, which does exactly what is described above. A screenshot is shown below.

The screenshot above tells the whole story except one important differentiator.

Semantic technology of hakia allows high-level of precision compared to any other similar platform. This enables the user to park highly specific questions against the emerging news. Therefore, my.hakia.com can be considered as “intelligence gathering dashboard”. Let us tell you how.

If you search Google news for Obama’s strategy for the new team, you will see that the results are mostly irrel

Scalability of Semantic Search on the WebDecember 4 2008

Let’s start with an analogy.

If you ever had a flat tire, you would know what it takes to change the tire. Using the standard equipment available in the trunk of any car, changing a flat tire would take anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. Doing the job requires minimum knowledge.

In Formula races, the time required for changing a tire would be under 8 seconds. It requires high-tech equipment engineered specifically for this task, and trained professionals to do it fast.

The difference between any semantic technology versus the one that will become a Web search engine is very much like changing a flat tire of any car versus a race car in Formula-1.

Powerset’s limited coverage (Wikipedia only) was a recent example that helped awareness of the scalability issue in the eyes of technology savvy readers. Without overcoming the scalability challenge, a semantic technology cannot become a Web application, nor can it become a solution in enterprises handling vast amounts of documents.

Compared to conventional indexing search engines (with popularity flavor), a semantic search engine comes with the burden of extra load. This is true because semantic algorithms do much more than what the indexing search engines do

Semantic Tools from hakia for On-line AdvertisingNovember 12 2008

At hakia, we have been developing our own Semantic Advertising System, which is at its final stages of testing. One of the branches of this development is the Contextual Advertising. We have developed a middle-ware system for contextual advertising which can be used by the 3rd party SEMs and on-line advertising warehouses.

To gauge the current state of things, we set up a demo system and experimented in comparison with the dominating player, Google Adsense’s test link. Several case studies later, we were surprised to find out that the Google’s ad targeting against the submitted content suffers seriously from poor relevancy significant percentage of the time. The on-line demo is available for interested parties, just send us an email and explain your interest.

The content below is about “BEAT GENERATION” but Google Adsense suggests ads like “beat maker” “Deadbeat father” and “beat DUI.” On the same screen, hakia identifies the correct triggers (bottom-left), and Yahoo test ads in response to these triggers bring relevant ads (top-left).

While hakia consistently identified the relevant content in all test cases, Google’s poor performance puzzled us. If th

hakia Polls Web Searchers: 83% Think Obama Is Better for the Future of the InternetOctober 30 2008

2008 is viewed as the first “Internet” presidential election. As the Washington Post aptly put it, the 2008 presidential race got the “whole world blogging.” Everyone was “Twittering” or blogging right after the debates this month. Media matched voters’ online activity with live streaming videos of Barack Obama and John McCain debates. YouTube has captured SNL’s Sarah Palin skits and her recent interview with Katie Couric. Lastly but not least, presidential candidates aggressively used the Internet for their campaigns.

We were curious to find out what Web searchers thought and asked one question: “Who is better for the future of the Internet, John McCain or Barack Obama?” Our on-going poll, which can be found at the homepage of hakia.com (please click “more” if you cannot see the poll), of over 2,700 respondents as of now is striking: 83% of Web searchers said that Barack Obama is better for the future of Internet- a win by a large margin.

This result may come to some as no surprise, as it has become widely known in the election that Obama’s campaign has