What, no more cookies?

I love a cookie with macadamia nuts throughout. I also would love to find a search engine without cookies – those irritating small text files that track your search history or monitor your search behaviour. Regular ThinkingShift readers will know of my dislike for anything that smacks of surveillance. Hakia has come to my rescue – it’s a new “meaning-based” search engine that will not place an insidious cookie on your PC when you search the site. At last, a search engine that respects privacy!

Hakia is also breaking away from the pack by using natural language technology. Search results try to provide a true representation of how the human mind thinks when foraging for information. Hakia does not rely on popularity or indexes like many other search engines. So the power is in the hands of the user and not the search engine.

Hakia prompts you to ask a question rather than type in a keyword or two. Compare these results for the question “what is cancer?” from Ask.com and Hakia to see the difference – Hakia arranges the search results as one might think about the topic ie what are the symptoms? what are the types of treatments? what research and statistics are available? Here’s the same search using the perennial favourite, Google.

Mmmm…could have done with Hakia four weeks ago – see this post for the reason. You can learn more about Hakia over at Read/WriteWeb.