VERBAL REASONING AND THE NEW INTERNET GOLDRUSH By John Sterlicchi in Florida ...Despite all those years of research and the $13m in venture capital that has poured into Powerset, the company won't offer users any searches until the end of this year. As a result it is not as far along as Hakia, which has gathered $16m investments from across Europe - including from $5m from Noble Grossart Investments, a subsidiary of the Scottish investment bank. On Hakia's advisory board is Prof Yorick Wilks, from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. Hakia's website is already running in test mode but it can perform what the company calls "meaning-based searches". An example is that if the users types in "What painkillers treat headaches?" Hakia's technology understand what "treat" means in this case and comes up with responses about drugs. Melek Pulatkonak, the company's chief operating officer, says that experts in the field believe search is very primitive at the moment and is operating at between 5 and 10% of its maximum efficiency, with reasonably complex searches taking around 11 minutes to complete. "The pioneers of search have done a great job in maximizing indexing technology but the future of search is not about retrieving information, it is about understanding the text, the queries and the web pages," she said. As Ms Pulatkonak says, only time will tell if PC users will expand their horizons beyond Google and try semantic search as opposed to keyword. ... Posted at: http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/search/story/0,,2043971,00.html