NEW TOOLS TO VIE WITH GOOGLE By Paul Taylor ...Powerset's search engine has yet to launch, so we'll have to wait and see, but some start-ups already have trial services or are about to launch them. They include AskMeNow ( www.askme now.com), Hakia (www. hakia.com) and TextDigger's Digger ( www.digger.com ). ... ...Hakia, fund-ed by a consortium of European venture capital companies, is running a trial service and is due to launch commercially this year - one of the first of many expected "semantic web" companies. Hakia claims that it "understands" questions andperforms "meaning-based -searches". I found it produced good and often extremely comprehensive results to relatively complex questions, although not always better than Google. It provides search examples, but to get a feel for it you need to use it for a while. It may not replace Google, but Hakia could appeal to those re-searching knowledge intensive subjects such as medicine, law, finance, science and literature. ... Posted at: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f5e4bfc6-de5b-11db-afa7-000b5df10621,_i_email=y,Authorised=false.html