October 20, 2008
Hakia's New Interface Sparkles
Hakia, the meaning-based engine, has redesigned its interface dramatically and Hakia is all the better for it. This takes it out of experimental and fringe to a very useable search tool and contender for our attentions.
Hakia works more meaning of words - the concepts of a query and of the content - and not with links to rank results. It has also begun a program to use "credible sites" for queries in health and environment.
Display may be in three columns, depending on results. The first is for the results, next images, and right-most column has the sponsored links. You'll see this in treating sciatica pain
Tabs give quick access to:
+ Web results: The results are pleasantly different (though they may not always seem higher in relevance than those from Google).
+ Credible sites: health and environment so far
+ News: Good range of sources from USA, UK, Canada and other countries
+ Images
+ Meet Others: talk to others about a topic - where people registered with Hakia post stories on topics such as Wall Street Rescue Plan.
+ Galleries: Hakia's mini-encyclopedia of entries on topics and people created from analyzing web content and assembling the material in meaningful groupings. These are always excellent.
+ MyHakia: personal space to customize - limited in sources and options. Weather is only for US cities, but can get headline news from many different parts of the world and can set up own news topics.
See Hakia improves the presentation of search results Pandia (Oct 13)
"Semantic search engine hakia launched a new user interface last week. The aim is to “take search beyond 10 blue links”. "
Also Search company Ask.com makes some changes - does it matter?
Pandia also compared the new Hakia to the new Ask, and suggests that Hakia wins in adopting an interface style that Ask has dropped. The article also describes the technology for answering questions that Ask is now using - a useful contrast to what we know about Hakia.
Posted by Gwen at October 20, 2008 12:41 PM