Kayak travel search launched a formal attack on Microsoft's Bing Travel yesterday in an article that appeared on Wired, Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us!. Apparently, Kayak's executives are more than a little steamed by the eerily similar look and feel, and even went so far as to put Microsoft on legal notice (presumably a cease & desist) to knock it off. Wired implies that Kayak is concerned about the similarities causing brand confusion with its users, and even noted an "uncomfortable" comparison in their own review of Bing, and points out that others have noticed as well. You can see f [...]

Related Topics: Microsoft: Bing Travel | Search Engines: Hakia | Search Engines: Travel Search Engines | Top News

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 bee [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Hakia

Today at SMX East, natural language search engine Hakia has launched a new search experience that  enables searchers to view categorized results, as well as view "Trusted" Results" from "Credible Sites". The Trusted Results program is an initiative Hakia  has developed with information professionals and librarians. As they note on their site: A popular Web source may not always be credible, and a credible Web source may not always be popular. hakia is the first search engine to integrate librarians’ collective knowledge of credible Web sites into search results to guide searchers. So [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Hakia

Can any start-up search engine "be the next Google?" Many have wondered this, and today's launch of Cuil (pronounced "cool") may provide the best test case since Google itself overtook more established search engines. Cuil provides what appears to be a comprehensive index of the web, offers a unique display presentation, and emerges at a time when people might be ready to embrace a quality "underdog" service. The big questions now are how does the relevancy hold up and can word-of-mouth really still build significant share? [Note: The Cuil site was supposed to be live for searches at [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Cuil | Search Engines: Hakia

After nearly two years in the making -- and plenty of hype -- Powerset has finally rolled out a "natural language" search engine. It's not a Google killer. It's barely a business model right now. But at least it's something the world can finally play with, and under the hood, there's lots of potential. By the time you read this, the Powerset site should have changed into a tool that allows you search against material within Wikipedia. Why bother using Powerset rather than using Wikipedia's own search tool or even Google set to look only within Wikipedia pages? The Powerset pitch is t [...]

Related Topics: Search Engines: Hakia | Search Engines: Powerset | Search Engines: Wikipedia | Search Features: Natural Language | Search Features: Query Refinement