Are Hakia, Powerset and Freebase All That Different?
This analysis brings up a question – which of these technologies are different and which are essentially the same? Lets get the easy one down first. Yahoo!’s SearchMonkey is no different from Google or any other search, as far as the core search technology is concerned. The difference is simply in the presentation layer. SearchMonkey is smart about creating a better user experience by letting publishers present the search results to the users in the best possible way. But when it comes to Hakia, Powerset and Freebase the situation is much more complicated. On the surface all these products are different – Hakia lets you search the whole web, Powerset is restricted to Wikipedia (and Freebase!) and Freebase itself has two search interfaces – the search box and query language. Here is the problem – the natural language interface has nothing to do with the underlying data representation. The fact is that all of these semantic search technologies allow people to type in arbitrarily complex
