Features —

Hakia: semantic search… set to music

Hakia hopes to bring "semantic search" to the masses, but how well will …

The intersection of search and samba

If you ever wondered what search queries sound like when set to music, Hakia has your answer. Employees at the beta semantic search engine have put together a band and recorded an album of songs based on actual user queries, things like "Weapons of Mass Instruction." Think samba meets lounge music meets beat poetry and you get the idea. It's a little... odd.

But Hakia doesn't mind being odd. The company was born out of a desire to do search differently. Search engines generally don't understand either content on the Web or the content of user queries; they work through keyword analysis, link weighting, and other statistical methods that allow an engine to produce more or less relevant results without ever needing to understand the implicit question in the search query.

Hakia is about semantic search, though, which requires understanding. It's a more difficult problem than traditional search, which already seems hard enough, but Hakia executives believe that only understanding can provide the next great leap forward in search. Ars talked with Hakia's CEO, Dr. Riza C. Berkan, and Melek Pulatkonak, the company's COO, about how Hakia aims to stake out territory in a province already claimed by plenty of other homesteaders.

Seeking understanding

Here's the pitch: Hakia allows people to search for "painkillers" and "headache," but can then turn up results—say, for "Tylenol"— that don't use either of those words. The engine recognizes the concepts that lie behind the search terms and attempts to match those rather than keywords. Pretty nifty if it works, but will it allow Hakia to carve a chunk out of Google's kingdom when Microsoft and Yahoo are both having trouble gaining ground?

Dr. Riza Berkan

"I don't know," Berkan says. "We just want to improve the capability of search in general."

This is essentially what the company has been doing for the past 36 months. The technology behind what Hakia wants to do is so complex that the company's scientists and engineers have spent years simply working out the fundamental research behind it. Hakia was founded in 2004 and has raised $16 million so far to fund its operations. Unusually, none of this comes from venture capital; it's all institutional investors. Hakia has one office in Turkey that does some research and development work, but the rest of the staff is located in New York City, where the band occasionally gets together and plays "Weapons of Mass Instruction" at The Knitting Factory.

Melek Pulatkonak

If the company can make semantic search pay off, it will accomplish a couple of difficult feats at once. First, it will provide a useful search interface to long-tail content. The more specialized a Web query gets, the harder it is for an engine that relies on counting and weighting links (like Google, for instance) to return useful results. For esoteric topics, there may simply not be enough of this material to make a purely statistical approach work. But if the search engine can actually understand the content of webpages in a basic way, it can evaluate their worthiness on its own—without counting links.

In a recent blog entry, Hakia's chief architect, Kartal Guner, compared long-tail queries to the hidden, underwater mass of an iceberg—these queries far outnumber the small group of popular searches that represent the visible tip of that iceberg. "Long-tail is more like a black hole," he says, shifting metaphors, "seemingly infinite, dark, cold, and merciless against popularity algorithms. These are the unpopular, longer than usual, complex, unique, and personal queries. These are the ones that need precision, accuracy, and relevancy." These are the queries Hakia hopes to answer best.

A second, related result would be that a new article on the ins and outs of collectible Boba Fett figurines could become a top result on that topic the moment it becomes a part of Hakia's index. Again, understanding the content is key. With other search engines, it could take days or weeks for a new page to filter the top of certain queries because the page does not initially have incoming links from trusted sources.

"Search is at a primitive stage," says Pulatkonak when we talk. She claims that traditional indexing has reached its limit as a technology. Search engines now need to move toward understanding, going from keyword search to sentence analysis. Those that don't will, in the end, only be good for answering the most popular queries as users recognize the value of semantic search.

But creating the backend technology to power a search engine that knows what it's reading is a daunting job. Here's how Hakia handles it.

You must to comment.