In my search for new ideas for blog posts, I frequently turn to the list of search terms that visitors to Lab Soft News have entered into their search engines to find the blog. If I click on any of these search terms, SiteMeter, the service that I use to monitor my blog usage, displays the same search engine retrieval page (SERP) that was shown to the visitor. One such visitor recently entered the search term "cardiac ultrasound laboratory project budget costs" into the beta version of a search engine called Hakia and was shown this SERP.
I was not familiar with Hakia but was surprised to see the following announcement in the top right portion of the page: MEET OTHERS who asked the same query. After clicking on this link, you are invited to START A CONVERSATION ROOM relating to "cardiac ultrasound laboratory project budget costs." Easy! Immediately find others with the same current interests.
I have previously blogged about social networking sites such Facebook, particularly those such as DailyStrength (see: More on the Social Networking and Medical Web Site Called DailyStrength) that provide an anonymous forum for people "with a wide variety of medical, psychological and life conditions." In a comparable way, Hakia provides the service of connecting people and creating forums based on topics of current interest. The search engine defines itself on its home page as a semantic search engine, which is defined if the following way in Wikipedia:
Rather than use ranking algorithms such as Google's PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.
If you search on Hakia for tomato and salmonella, you are invited to link to the Hakia tomato gallery for tomato. There you are presented with a virtual cornucopia of tomato facts in categories such as the following: Plant Profile, Image Search, Headlines (e.g. Tomatoes now deemed safe), Plant Facts, Seeds and Instructions, Anatomy and Reproduction, Photographs and Pictures, Movies and Documentaries. I now understand the power of semantic search. I can't wait to get to those tomato movies.
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