Hakia, a natural language search engine, has just added a new spin to search: social networking. Their new Meet Others feature lets you connect with others who are searching for the same things you are.

Since Hakia processes queries differently than old school search engines such as Google, you aren’t just matched up with people who typed in the exact query you did — you’re matched with a larger set of searchers that Hakia thinks are looking for the same things you are based on natural language processing. For instance, if you’re searching for “what drug treats a headache,” Hakia processes the semantic relationships between words and may deduce that someone searching for “what medicine relieves migraines” is a match. And that type of processing is the crux of how Hakia wants to differentiate itself.

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