i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Hakia is a company that uses semantic search, taking into account word context and a hiearchy of categories that a search term might fall into.  Supposedly Microsoft's Bing's category designations are based on Hakia.  The company also recently (about a month ago) came out with a commercial ontology product called Contexa to help advertisers better connect with relavent web content.

You can decide for yourself whether Hakia offers better results than standard search by comparing their results with Google here:

http://club.hakia.com/challenge/default2.aspx?q=carrots&lang=Web

More about Contexa and a case study of Commerical Ontology Search here:

http://blog.hakia.com/?p=890