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.

I’m in a surprisingly pessimistic mood today regarding AI. I was thinking about search engines. We rely on them daily. They take the vast content of the web and shrink it down into some ranked subset of relevancy to a query. There’s just an arbitrary algorithm thrown in the middle to rank results. Thats fine. I just want a lead as to where the results are.

This is where certain search engines cross the line. Search engines like Ask! and Answers.com try to confuse the user by allowing them to ask questions. A user is lead to believe that they are talking to a computer that will give them the answer. In reality these sites simply parse out relevant terms using a large grammar and can’t actually reason at all.

Enter Hakia. A search engine billed as a semantic search engine. Could this possibly have an ability to reason? Of course not. Asking Hakia a question normally yields the same search results without common sense or logical sentence evaluation. Its closer as it seems to do a bit of taxonomic searching and wordnet parsing but at the end of the day, it filters and doesn’t reason.
Of course Just for the fun of it I asked that ugly Alice a question.

Human: what color is a blue car?
ALICE: Red.
Human: really?
ALICE: For real.

So in short, we aren’t there yet.