hakia, a “meaning-based” search engine, has landed an additional $5 million in funding from existing shareholder Prokom Investments S.A., a private equity fund based in Poland. This latest round brings the startup’s investment capital total to $21 million.

With the company still in beta mode, the funds will go toward continued development of the search engine, with an eye on launching in the first half of this year.

hakia aims to offer “a quality search experience that no one has seen before,” said CEO Riza C. Berkan.

The central challenge for hakia is that the firm's current site provides a search engine experience for users that's not very different from what's widely available in the marketplace. “Sometimes it's better, but very often it’s not,” said analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.

Founded in 2004, the New York City-based company is among a crowded market of search engine startups hoping to change the way the search experience work. Along with hakia, San Francisco, California-based Powerset and the Australian company Lexxe are hoping to be the semantic search engine of choice. Meanwhile, San Mateo, California-based Wikia Search, Santa Monica, California-based Mahalo, and mobile search startup ChaCha, based in Carmel, Indiana, aim to stand out from the pack by recruiting people to manually edit search results.

“What it [semantic search] amounts to is trying to understand a query more holistically rather than parsing it into individual words. A lot of people have decided that this is something that is very hard to do…it’s not something that’s imminent,” said Mr. Sterling.

While query results on conventional search engine giants like Google and Yahoo are statistical, or popularity based, hakia’s results are based off of conceptual relationships, said Mr. Berkan.

The problem with Google’s system is that “some information may not be popular, but correct, and some information may be popular, but false,” said Mr. Berkan.

Executives at search giant Google seems unfazed by such assertions. "Search is a highly competitive industry and we welcome competition that stimulates innovation and provides users with more choice,"  a Google representative wrote in an e-mail.

The startup does not see itself as a direct competitor to Google, but rather as the go-to search engine when other engines fail. “The people who will appreciate the site the most are the power users, professional users, or users who have serious problems that they’re trying to solve, such as medical or legal,” Mr. Berkan said.

However, mainstream consumers do not understand semantic search, said Mr. Sterling. It’s not obvious to consumers “why you should use this search engine versus others. They say that Google is capturing key words that may or may not capture the intended meaning behind the phrase…but by and large Google gets you to the right pages,” he said.

The conventional indexing approach used by other search engines can’t keep up with dynamic sites that are changing all the time, said Mr. Berkan. “Statistics-based systems will be behind more and more,” he said.

“Dr. Riza Berkan, and the team at hakia.com, are driving web search to a new level. The task is arduous, but, we have seen that this team is pushing the search industry to its next level,” said Ryszard Krauze, CEO of Prokom Investments S.A., in a release.

“Investors are hopeful,” said Mr. Sterling. Advertisers are pouring billions of dollars into search engines, so even a little piece can be profitable. Or, one of the major players may decide to acquire the company and integrate its technology into its current offering.

According to Nielsen Online, Google claims over half of the search market. With other major search sites like Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com, left “struggling to maintain a share of the search market…it’s very unlikely that an upstart will break out,” said Mr. Sterling.

The search startup is currently working with Ask.com’s advertising system, but the new round of funding will also be used to build hakia’s own semantic advertising platform and a European data center. Hakia hopes to attract advertising dollars by leveraging its technology to serve up more relevant ads.

Further expanding its search potential, the site also offers people the option to see who else has entered the same or similar query. The site’s social networking service is voluntary and anonymous by default, but users can choose to add their contact information.

The search engine’s social side is “more transactional,” said Mr. Berkan, who likens the feature to Craigslist rather than Facebook. “It’s not a place to present yourself to the world,” he said. “It’s a place to connect…with people who are asking the same question.”

The social side is interesting, said Mr. Sterling. Part of the rise of social networks may be attributed to individuals looking to ask for recommendations directly from real people, rather than getting lost down the search engine rabbit hole.

Even with the potential to differentiate itself with its social features, “right now it’s going to be very, very hard for anybody to shake up the search market,” said Mr. Sterling. “There is some next generation search experience that everyone is trying to work on, but no one has figured it out yet.”