2007 is going to be the year of the Semantic Web - and one of the first signs of that is the appearance of Semantic Search Engines that understand the meaning of phrases and can "extract" meaning out of diverse pages on the web.

Read/WriteWeb has a post on a new Semantic Search Engine - based in New York City - that launched in beta last month called Hakia.  I did some experiments and the results did not look that different from Google - perhaps a little better in some subtle ways.  Here's a couple of experiments Read/WriteWeb did:

"..Hakia experiments

Next I decided to try out some of the examples that the Hakia team suggests on its homepage, along with some of my own. The first one was Why did the chicken cross the road?, which is a Hakia example. The answers were fine, focusing on the ironic nature of the question. Particularly funny was Hakia's pick:

My next query was more pragmatic: Where is the Apple store in Soho? (another example from Hakia). The answer was perfect. I then performed the same search on Google and got a perfect result there too. 

Then I searched for Why did Enron collapse?. Again Hakia did well, but not noticeably better than Google. However, I did see one very impressive thing in Hakia. In its results was this statement: Enron's collapse was not caused by overstated resource reserves, but by another kind of overstatement. This is pretty witty…. but I am still not convinced that it is doing semantic analysis. Here is why: that reply is not constructed out of words because Hakia understands the semantics of the question. Instead, it pulled this sentence out of one of the documents which had a high rank, that matches the Why did Enron collapse? query.

In my final experiment, Hakia beat Google hands down. I asked Why did Martha Stewart go to jail? - which is not one of Hakia's homebrewed examples, but it is fairly similar to their Enron example. Hakia produced perfect results for the Martha question:

I'm going to use Hakia for the next week -when ever I can - and then write what I think about the search engine.