Web-lish By Andy Greenberg ..Word order isn't the only factor that becomes more fluid with semantic search: Search terms and result terms no longer need to match exactly. Taking the question "What drug is best for treating a urinary tract infection?," search start-up Hakia's founder Riza Berkan points to the word "drug." Hakia's algorithm, he says, understands that the word contains a massive subset of concepts including synonyms and specific names of medicines. When it spots a term that falls into that subset, like "Amoxicillin," Hakia can substitute the medicine's name for the word "drug" in the result. "You don't want the word 'drug,' you want the name of the drug," says Berkan. "That's a hidden failure in search engines, and people don't even know what they're missing." The exciting possibility of meaning-based advantages like these, according to Berkan and Pell, is that semantic algorithms won't just make keywordese obsolete--they could even become smart enough to pull searchers away from big players like Google and Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ). Both start-ups have infected investors with excitement too: Powerset has raised at least $12.5 million in funding, and Hakia has raised $21 million.... Posted at: http://www.forbes.com/business/2008/02/21/search-engine-semantic-tech-cx_ag_language_sp08_0221hakia.html