As both technology reporter and consumer I rely heavily on web search tools to find and then track through the thickets of information accessible to anyone with a PC and internet connection.

My browser home pages point to Google, or more precisely iGoogle, the personalised version, which I have set up to display an array of news, blog and other data. But that does not mean Google - and any of the other general purpose search engines - are always the best tools for finding information, especially if you are interested in tracking trends, opinions and relationships. For this you need to tap into next-generation "semantic" search tools, such as Hakia ( www.hakia. com ) , that try to understand the concept of a search query using techniques such as sentence analysis . Most other leading search engines rely mainly on analysing keywords.