The INFO Project Blog

Hakia is a new social searching tool that, in the eyes of some trend watchers, is making Google look “old school.”

After listening to the BBC World Service Health Check’s broadcast from Bangladesh, focusing on maternal health and doctor scarcity in this flood-prone nation, I was curious to see what its maternal mortality rate was. So I googled–oops, searched–for “bangladesh maternal mortality rate.” This is what it told me:

The following should help: Bangladesh’s maternal mortality rate - at 440 deaths per 100,000 live births - is a leading cause of death. See this page. …See the hakia gallery for Bangladesh

It then listed 10 resources with an answer to this query, highlighting the relevant passage.

Clicking through to the Hakia gallery for Bangladesh took me to a list of resources divided into tabs like Country Profile, Culture, and Cities.

A parallel search on Google did not answer the question, but the first hit, a UNICEF country profile, told me that Hakia’s statistics might be outdated. The adjusted rate (1995-2005) of MM is 380 per 100,000 births.

The “social” part of Hakia isn’t actually the conversational responses, which come from Ask.com, or the handy-highlighting (called Hakia ScoopBar), it’s checking to see who else searches like you.

 The folks at SearchEngineland.com write:

Their new Meet Others feature lets you connect with others who are searching for the same things you are. Since Hakia processes queries differently than old school search engines such as Google, you aren’t just matched up with people who typed in the exact query you did — you’re matched with a larger set of searchers that Hakia thinks are looking for the same things you are based on natural language processing.

So I clicked on “Meet Others who asked the same query” and discovered that, apparently, no one did. Popular searches include “Chicago pets” and “does Airborne really work.”