If you’re a general search engine that competes with Google (Yahoo & Microsoft), as you know, it’s very hard to make headway in that game. But if you recharacterize or reposition yourself as other than a “search engine” you might gain some adoption. To some degree that’s what Kosmix did by building out multi-media rich Wikipedia-like “topic pages” (a better version of the US version of Yahoo Glue Pages). Hakia faces this same conundrum. The company has been trying for some time to tell people that its “semantic search” delivers better results than Google. However people largely haven’t been listening.

Now the company is introducing a customizable start page (much like iGoogle, Netvibes or MyYahoo) called MyHakia. The company is calling it a “digital newspaper,” which is a good marketing hook.

The hope is that use of this page will expose people to Hakia’s search results.

Related Topics: Search Engines: Hakia

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling