Fred Wilson posted about shortcomings of text search. The same issue’s been on my mind since finding out about Hakia about a year ago.  Hakia is one of the few ventures into semantic search.

Fred gives the humorous example that his blog A VC is the third return when one searches for ‘allen iverson email’ in Google.  In Hakia, the same search returns a different,and to my novice eye, a better set of links.

Now here’s the odd part.  Being a semantic search tool, Hakia would like you to search using natural language.  So, I did a search for ‘what is allen iverson’s email address?’.  And guess what?  The first return was Fred’s blog!! 🙂

So, Fred, maybe you are the correct source for AI’s email address.

BTW, I have had a few conversations with Dr. Riza Can Berkan, the co-founder and CEO of Hakia, and know that Hakia is going through an extensive proprietary indexing process.  In fact, the Hakia website states that "Hakia’s evolution is 18% complete".  So, it is probably not fair to pass any judgment on its current accuracy and effectiveness.