the semantics of search - is it Web 3.0 yet?

Richard McManus of Read/WriteWeb has been talking to the founders of a semantic web search engine that has a focus on natural language processing methods and analyses sentences in order to perform searches. Hakia will come out of beta towards the end of 2007. The CEO of Hakia, Riza Berkan, was invited to make comparisons between his product, between Ask.com which is an indexing search engine, and Google, which McManus claims is already using semantic technologies. McManus writes that

Riza's view is that Google works with popularity algorithms and so it can "never have enough statistical material to handle the Long Tail". He says a search engine has to understand the language, in order to properly serve the Long Tail. Moreover, Hakia's view is that the vastness of data that Google has doesn't solve the semantic problem - Riza and Melek think there needs to be that semantic connection present. Their bigger claim though is that the big search companies are still thinking within an indexing framework (personalization etc). Hakia thinks that indexing has plateaued and that semantic technologies will take over for the next generation of search.

Cross-posted to Library Sputnik.

Postscript:

>There's another post on ReadWriteWeb from yesterday which discusses Google's contribution to semantic searching on the Web in more detail, by Phil Midwinter, here.

I mention it simply because in the comments, Google Sets is mentioned, a Google Labs initiative which is online for testing and improvement. Go visit - it invites you to put in a set of related keywords, then watch it wrestle to find additional words that belong to the 'set'.

I put in literary review, authors, journalists and small magazines - and got back sweet nothing for my pains. I ran off to blog elsewhere, came back and ten minutes later Google Sets was still thinking about it.