By: Senior staff writer – Easton Ellsworth

Hold on to your hat. A new semantic search engine’s in town.

It’s called hakia.

And here are 10 things you should know about it.

1. It’s hakia, not Hakia. And we have no idea how to pronounce it. Probably like you’re gonna hock a loogie.
2. It’s a natural language search engine. You can ask it a question in human-speak and it (is supposed to) answer your question. Like who will win the 2008 US presidential election.
3. It’s been around since 2004. Back when your blog was in diapers.
4. Offices are in New York City and Istanbul, Turkey.
5. hakia has $21 million in funding from several private investors, including ex-Senator Bill Bradley.
6. Bluhalo has just made hakia its Site of the Month.
7. You can compare hakia results to those of the Google, Yahoo! or MSN search engines at the Hakia Challenge page.
8. hakia doesn’t index. They QDEX.
9. It has some smart folks at the helm. An authority on ontological semantics … a nuclear scientist … etc.
10. Librarians!

Okay,11. hakia has a company blog.

hakia doesn’t yet have the look and feel of a major search engine. It’s a bit rough and hokey-looking around the edges. (Then again, so were Google and Yahoo! at the outset. And MSN/Live still is.)

But the search results are often as good or better than those served up by the big G.

Do you think hakia has a shot at beating Google with natural language search?