So maybe I was wrong. I looked more into hakia today. They actually have a pretty sweet search engine. It seems to utilize wordnet as well as some cool proactive querying. Hakia actually extracts queries from the webpage as its crawled. Thats pretty cool.

Additionally they use a SemanticRank which is allegedly better than popularity rank. This is actually a very useful concept. It seems to be similar to what Chris Anderson talks about in the long tail. While popularity is important in some cases it is generally geared towards the lowest common denominator. For example Amazon.com has information about a lot of things and is very popular. However its safe to say that if I want information about a new phone, a niche blog post dedicated to the phone will most likely contain more information as it is written by subject matter experts in the field they’re interested in.

So how well does it all work? I’m not sure yet. I’ve officially switched my quick search bar from google to hakia for a few weeks (or more if it goes well) I’ll let you (my 5 readers and whoever catches this on technorati) know how it goes.

UPDATE:
Christian from Hakia was kind enough to correct me. Hakia doesn’t actually use wordnet. Its actually ontological semantics. Pretty cool stuff really check out the link in his comment.