Remember when Ricki Ricardo would come home and interrupt Lucy in the middle of some hijinx, and exclaim, “Lucy! You have some ’splaining to do.” Well in my best Ricki accent I ask you: “Will someone please ’splain to me what the deal is with the VCs and sematic search?” I have blogged about this before, but I see more silliness even as I read the 20 or so daily blogs I read. Here’s the latest:

Hakia Raises $2 Million For Semantic Search
from paidContent.org by joseph@paidcontent.org (Joseph Weisenthal)

Semantic search engine Hakia has raised $2 million of a planned $5 million round, according to VentureWire (via VentureBeat). The funding, from an unidentified investor, follows $16 million in funding that was announced last year, bringing its total raise to $18 million. Previous institutional backers include Noble Grossart Investments Ltd., Alexandra Investment Management, Prokom Investments and KVK. The NYC-based company is one of several startups claiming to be analyze content based on meaning. Others in the space include Powerset and Yedda, which was acquired by AOL. The site has also unveiled a social element, similar to what ChaCha is doing.

So if you recall from my previous post, Hakia doesn’t do anything better than Ask.com. But besides the fact that its search algorithm doesn’t return results that a user can clearly see are better, this is a CRAZY investment.

Look, if Google is at all interested in this, you can rest assured that it has 10 times the human resources and 10 times the capital devoted to the same thing. Ceterus paribus, I’ll bet on Google over Hakia. So that said, it is likely that Google is already ahead in this game. If it is, then Hakia will never even be an acquisition target. If Google is not interested in this technology, then it probably indicates that semantic search is not any kind of a threat to current search providers.

I’d say the same for Microsoft. If it cared about search, it *could* do something with all of its resources. But don’t you wonder why MS has just conceded this ground? I mena the MSN search engine still isn’t anything to write home about. For the most part I think that Yahoo! and MS are betting that the trend of moving advertising to content laden social networking sites - and AWAY from search - will continue.

So MSN and Yahoo! are moving into the social web, Google apparently doesn’t care about semantic search, and the VC’s like this technology? Dear Sand Hill Road: that sound you hear is your money going down the toilet. Oh, and in my search above where I asked how Pronetos could raise $18 million, I got totally useless search results. Thanks, Hakia!