Today my friends at hakia.com announced an additional §5 million investment, this brings the total investment in the meaning based search engine to $21 million so far. Hakia has perhaps the best chance of breaking the semantic search barrier this year and these additional funds are earmarked for developing a semantic advertising platform. Additionally, hakia intends to use the funds to build a European data-center and take search to the next logical step.

Hakia has been my favorite startup project for some time because of the potential there and the people who have befriended me out of course. Hakia and Powerset have their sites set on becoming the world’s first semantic or meaning based search engines. Both entities are developing advanced language capability along with artificial intelligence (AI) acting on what is termed “the long tail query.”

Essentially these semantic engines will be able to “understand” user queries more specifically and then be able to return much more relevant results to the end user.

This round of investment was led by Prokom Investments S.A., one of hakia’s current stockholders. I communicated with Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia, just the other day and was happy to learned that hakia is almost done with their initial development stage and that this round of investment is an incremental part of the next phase of development. Hakia is bent on making significant advancements towards semantic search this year and in my opinion they stand the best chance to demonstrate the power of advanced search technologies.

I have covered hakia virtually across the Web over these last months and have yet to find a better contender for the title: “champion of alternative search engines.” The task before hakia is a daunting one, but the potential there is virtually unlimited when meaning based search becomes a reality. It is significant to note that this round of funding is earmarked for “semantic” advertising I think. Not many consider just how impactful actual semantic search will be on the infastgructure of the Web. Advertising will almost certainly be supplanted with a more robust, effective and honest system in my book. From the conversations Riza and I have had, it is apparent to me that spam and adword type ads will eventually be as dated as black and white TV.

Many people I know are skeptical of hakia’s capability to solve the problems inherent in this type of research and development, but the eventuality of semantic search seems quite apparent to me. So far hakia has only made one mistake in the development, that being opening up to the public so quickly. Most people simply are not willing to do the research and are turned off when the hakia beta engine does not produce gold from lead – so to speak. Irregardless of this, Riza and the other scientists at hakia are some of the finest minds in the world – if they can’t make semantic search work – it may never come to pass.