Bing, the new search engine from Microsoft just went live and in doing so introduced a similar version of hakia’s categorized search. At its launch in 2006, hakia became the first search engine to provide categorized aspects of search queries via hakia Galleries.

hakia Galleries received industry accolades after their formal introduction in 2007. Our goal has always been to take search beyond 10 blue links. It was then no surprise when Microsoft invited us to show them the inner workings of the hakia Galleries in July 2008- shortly after their acquisition of Powerset. But it was a huge surprise to recently find out that Microsoft introduced categorized search in Bing. Today we checked out the Bing preview and compared the Bing’s categorized search feature to its inspiration, hakia Galleries.

hakia Galleries provide categorized aspects of search queries. For example, if you are searching for Obama, you can find information about his official site, headline news, images, biography, speeches, and more (see image below). Powered by semantic search, hakia Galleries prove 17 aspects of this query. We save the user time by answering 17 Obama related questions in one search. Compare the hakia Obama gallery with the same search at Bing.com (Bing provides only 7 aspects of this search query).

Let’s look at another example. Search for lung cancer at hakia and Bing. hakia provides the searcher links for the following aspects of this query: Basic Information and FAQ, Image Search, Headline News, Symptoms and Diagnostics, Treatment, Procedures, and Therapy, News, Clinical Trials, Healthcare Facilities and Finding a Physician, Alternative Therapy, For Kids, Research and Statistics, Organizations, Message Boards, and Images. Compare that with Bing’s aspects: articles, symptoms, treatment, prognosis, stages, clinical trials, and images. Look familiar?

As Danny Sullivan put it aptly in his Bing review, “Probably the most significant change is that Bing now organizes search results into categories (gives Obama example)…The concept of grouping results also isn’t new. Long known as clustering, you can see it in operation at hakia (see Obama there) or Clusty (again, see Obama there).”

At hakia we could not dream of a marketing budget of $80-100 million. But hey, if you are out there to try Bing as an alternative search engine to Google, give the original categorized search a try at hakia.com (one of Bing’s inspirations!). You can surf the hakia Galleries here: http://gallery.hakia.com/ or try your search at hakia.com when you bing and ding.