Hakia vs. Google: the 5 Million Dollar Question

Hakia just loaded up with another $5M to keep working on their semantic search “web 3.0″ product.

Out of interest, I compared search results for what I thought would be a good “semantic” search on both ol’ faithful Google and newfangled Hakia.

The query was: “How to protect my privacy on facebook.” Hakia’s results are here, Google’s here. Screenshots and commentary follow.

I figured it would be a good test of the two because there’s meaning to be extracted from the semantics of the sentence - “how to” implies that I’m seeking a tutorial, “protect” means that I have a specific action in mind, as opposed to just seeking editorial content on “facebook” and “privacy” and so on.

The verdict? Hakia’s second result was a splog trying to get me to sign up for a credit assessment. The rest of the Hakia results were a low quality mish-mash of blog posts and miscellaneous content which by and large were discussions about Facebook - for example, a bunch of HuffPo stuff.

Google on the other hand, started with a PDF from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner on how to adjust privacy settings in your Facebook profile, and continued with several highly relevant tutorials (including Facebook’s own privacy pages), before breaking down into discussion posts.

The bottom line? Google’s result was massively superior. On the other hand, Hakia has built in social networking, offering to introduce me to others who have received similarly dissatisfying results for the same search. Super! Ok, fine. I’m not giving Hakia a fair shake with a sample size of one. But nor will anyone else, and first impressions count. At least Powerset keeps their weak beta results private; Hakia should have done the same, IMHO.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 and is filed under News and Opinions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.