Hakia’s argument for choosing them over bigger search engines like Google is that popularity doesn’t equal relevance in terms of search. They believe that while Google has its own algorithms to measure the relevance of a site based on your search, that formula is inherently flawed by not giving too much authority to unrelated factors.

For its part, Hakia is now calling on professionals and librarians to volunteer their expertise and contribute lists of sites that are authoritative to certain subjects and searches users might enter. For example, they would want to find a librarian that can approve of sites that can be trusted when somebody searches for “french revolution.” Then, based on the information provided, the search engine will eschew results from more popular sites in favor of the site that is most authoritative.

Hakia’s semantic web search already has such results medical and environmental topics, but is looking expand their coverage to include other topics.

Google and Yahoo do have quality raters themselves, and they are paid actual money, while Hakia’s raters are going to be given prizes like free books.

Of course, nobody is really sure how good the quality raters of Google and Yahoo are, and many believe that something on the order of Hakia search, Mahalo, or Wikia Search is necessary to make search more social and thus more trustworthy. After all, what is Google’s Knol but a repository of supposedly credible sources?

Those interested in volunteering for Hakia can sign up here and join the shindig. Let us know about those fabulous prizes.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:16 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.