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Posted by Phil Butler on March 14th, 2007
We had an exclusive interview with Dr. Riza C. Berkan, CEO of hakia today. For those of you who don't know, hakia is building the Web's new “meaning based” search engine. The vision of the company is to improve search relevancy and interactivity to take web search beyond its current boundaries and into the future. We have covered hakia on a couple of occasions and have been loocking forward to talking with Dr. Berkan.
Dr. Berkan is a nuclear scientist who specializes in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic. He is also a notable authority on high level computing in natural language processing, author of the book “Fuzzy Systems Design Principles”, and author of numerous articles on artificial intelligence.
I have to tell you guys what a rare pleasure it was to talk with Dr. Berkan. Coming off the interview with Jimmy Wales of Wikia, I have been fortunate to be able to talk with two of the nicest and most innovative Web 2.0 people out there. Dr. Berkan personally led me on a guided tour of what hakia's capabilities are now, and will be before the end of the year. Dr, Berkan said something on the hakia site that I find very true: “Internet Search is the single most important phenomenon for global unification and progress of human civilization.”
After about 40 minutes of having all my questions answered without having asked them (a little like being with the Oracle in the Matrix), I just had to ask some questions, well what was left of them any way.
Profy: How or when did the vision for hakia begin Dr. Barkam?
Dr. Berkan: Well, Victor Raskin (Imminent professor-Purdue) and I worked together 16 years ago for the US Government in the nuclear field. We waited around for a while for someone to come up with a language based search engine, and when no one did, we decided to do it.
Profy: That is so funny, (laughs all around). How does QDEX differ from old indexing systems?
Dr. Berkan: Old indexing methods essentially used one index table, while QDEX dissects the data and stores it to gateways for any possible queries one might ask. The information density in the QDEX system is much higher and therefore full semantic analysis can be undertaken more easily. The QDEX is distributed over a network of very fast servers that can individually access bits of data more rapidly than from a single source.
Profy: So this is like a Raid configuration for hard drives in a way?
Dr. Berkan: Well there is a slight similarity, but a better analogy would be comparing old indexing to a balloon, and thinking of QDEX as bubble wrap. A balloon fills up and expands as data is added, while bubble wrap maintains its cohesive nature but spreads the data into many smaller entities. Scaling active data sets makes better use of bandwidth, CPU usage, and storage capacity.
Profy: These are fascinating innovations; can you give a simple example of how this works?
Dr. Berkan: Sure, take a system like Google uses, and ask the math to decompose the sentence structure of a sentence with say 10 words. The result would be hundreds of queries resulting in no active data sets. Trying to break down a 10 word sentence with mathematics would produce billions of permutations. However, a person would break that same sentence down into perhaps 5 or 6 permutations. QDEX combined with the SemanticRank Algorithm bridges that huge gap and produces far fewer permutations.
Profy: This looks like a lot more than a search engine to me?
Dr. Berkan: Actually hakia is much more. Search is reduced now to people looking relevant queries for pages and a fairly limited range of data. People have real problems that search engines cannot address. They have health, money, relational and other personal issues that search does not address. Eventually, hakia will be able to address these real world issues with tangible, valuable and actionable results.
Profy: It would appear that SEO companies will have to hire a whole new job description in order to attempt to manipulate hakia as they have Google?
Dr. Berkan: (laugh) Yes, I am not currently aware of any method that might be employed in an effort to circumvent the relevancy of hakia. In essence, hakia results render the actual content that was asked for with no ambiguity as to the content. Any attempt to optimize a page's placement would effectively render the actual page.
Profy: So a junk company wanting top ranking for the search “War and Peace”, would have to write the book “War and Peace” to be ranked in the top 2?
Dr. Berkan: (laugh) Yes that is essentially it. They would have to turn their site into someone else's to be seen as relevant.
Profy: Thank you so much for your time and my lesson in Web 4.0 search Dr. Berkan!
Dr. Berkan: It is my pleasure, we are happy that Profy is so interested in what we are trying to achieve.
It is a wonderful thing to be able to glimpse the future. I feel terrible that I cannot adequately display here just how cutting edge and advanced hakia's work is. The list of people associated with this project and their openness speaks volumes about the character of this company.
There are a couple of things that we need to focus on in evaluating hakia at this time. First and foremost, hakia is still in Beta development. If you go there, please look at the examples and try to guide yourself through what is actually taking place there. This effort is a lot more than the neat organization of some facts. As an engineer myself, I grasp what this is going to be when complete but it is nearly impossible to represent in a blog form. What you are looking at in hakia is the way people will browse and search the net in the years to come. This is as unavoidable as the trend towards color TV from black and white 50 years ago. Whatever you are using to search the web folks, that will be a dinosaur in a little while, seriously.
Result of keyword search. Note: Question search and phrase search are possible and revealing!
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| Hakia is here | Flawless Mind | March 15th, 2007 at 2:09 am |
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[…] Read the interview with the brain behind Hakia.com.. […] | |
| Slow Down Web 2.0! | March 26th, 2007 at 2:29 am |
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[…] Slow Down Web 2.0! Posted by Phil Butler on March 26th, 2007 I wrote an article a short time back about hakia, a semantic based search engine that I found fascinating. The reason I found it so fascinating is because I have a normative mind set. This is a function of a human mind trained to accept empirical evidence, but compelled more by the feeling or nature of the universe. Neither empiricists nor normative people are either superior or inferior, but do often betray their natures on the Web and in the physical world. […] | |
| K.A.I.E.C. » Blog Archive » Semantic Search with Hakia | July 5th, 2007 at 11:05 am |
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[…] Another interview with Dr. Berkan can be found at profy.com: Interview - Dr. Berkan, hakia Mastermind. People have real problems that search engines cannot address. They have health, money, relational and other personal issues that search does not address. Eventually, hakia will be able to address these real world issues with tangible, valuable and actionable results. (Dr. Berkan) […] | |
| Hakia Challenge - What Could Be More Relevant? | September 22nd, 2007 at 10:56 am |
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[…] As you probably already know hakia's semantic search engine has been one of my favorite topics on Profy and other tech blogs as well. Hakia began its quest for better search right out in the open where anyone could gauge the engine's progress at any time along the path to a true semantic relevance. This has obviously been a double edged sword as early detractors could point out that results were initially not a hole lot better than any other engine's. I initially found hakia's transparency to be symbolic of something truly extraordinary. Subsequent discussions with Riza and hakia's President Melek Pulatkonak have fortified my belief in this particular company and semantic search in general. […] | |
| Hakia Nominated For Webware 100 - Vote | February 26th, 2008 at 8:37 pm |
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[…] I have written about hakia and the other search engines probably more than anyone except Charles Knight of AltSearchEngines. So, I would prefer not to go into the technology behind hakia at this stage. Suffice it to say that you should check out what is happening at hakia from time to time and also vote for them at Webware 100. I expect to get behind the scenes soon and into hakia labs - so perhaps more information is forthcoming. […] | |
Comments |
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| M Jama | March 15th, 2007 at 2:00 am |
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I always though about Google and other search engines talk about the quantities of hits you search for simple thing and you get at least 1,000,000 plus hits which users only browse the first 2 pages if they lucky not because they found what they want but because they didn’t and they want to refine their search .. This brings me back to the Semantic Web and the tagging system using xml , results well be many not as current in quality but far better in quality | |
| Phil Butler | March 15th, 2007 at 7:34 am |
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Thanks guys! Hi MJ! Yes, I felt really privileged to have Dr. Berkan lead me through their fantastic world. I was also rather inept at putting all he related to me into words (which is unusual for me as some of you know). Scientists like Dr. Berkan always have a way of explaining things that seems so eloquent and simple, but then you are left on your own to assimilate all that information. | |
| John kramer | March 26th, 2007 at 5:45 pm |
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I bet these people are waisting their time and money. There is Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spending so much money on searching, how can these guys compete?? They have what raised $11 million? These companies are probabably spending 11 million a day to get their searches work well. | |
| Phil Butler | March 26th, 2007 at 7:46 pm |
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Well, hakia and the other entities (Powerset, Wikia-Search) do not need to spend all that much to do relevant searches. The type search they are creating cannot be manipulated by SEO and is much faster and more efficient. The only advantage Google has right now are the huge numbers of pages indexed and of course their position in the market. I expect then oil lamp producing companies were spending a ton of money right before the light bulb was invented too. Sorry, I have heard so much from people with Googleitis that I often wonder how we got out of caves with out human complacency. Then again, caves were pretty fuzzy compared to downtown Miami. Always, | |
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