• Kosmix -- Indians' Answer To Google

    Kosmix -- Indians' Answer To Google

    Techtree News Staff, Dec 10, 2008 1214 hrs IST

    With customized search pages to prioritize modules

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Kosmix - a search service start-up led by two Indian entrepreneurs, Anand Rajarman and Venky Harinarayan - has received $20 million worth of funds. The funds were provided by Time Warner, the media and entertainment conglomerate. It would be unfair to directly compare it with Google, for Kosmix is a search service based on a new approach. However, it's no secret that Kosmix is optimistic about being able to cruise ahead of Google.

In the recent past, search service alternatives like Cuil, Searchme, Mahalo, Cooliris, etc. have been directly compared to Google. Kosmix offers a 360-degree topic-centric search option with a dashboard-style view. Web content, which includes news, videos, reviews, opinions, and communities, is aggregated by the search engine to offer the user deeper understanding of the subject he/she is looking up.

The Kosmix search engine is just into the beta stage of development, and an official blog post describes how the major highlights are the interesting, new, and relevant features included.

Kosmix is also reported to be planning customized search pages with which the user can prioritize modules. For example, a person looking for visual search results can put images and videos first, before textual queries.

With an entirely new search approach, Kosmix was successful in impressing people looking for specific and deeper information on a particular query. Google does offer that, but it is mainly limited to specific tabs like images and news.

Google was heavily criticized for their recent SearchWiki experiment; meanwhile, new search service start-ups got a chance to create a buzz. To date, Kosmix offers results on the basis of simple search queries, but advanced search queries like "Games-PG" don't give advanced results at the moment. Still in the beta stage, Kosmix has a long way to go.

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Discussion Board
(2) Comments
laptopxpert.com
,calicut, on Dec 10, 2008 05:26 PM
Google can NEVER be beaten, and the reason can be found in it's ascent. Compared to the search webpage of all the search engines that went before it, googl e offered simplicity. For me, and most users, that - more than the accuracy of the search results - was the strongest reasons to head to google everytime info was needed. Later on, probably, the algo was tweaked to improve accuracy and what not. Google can NEVER be beaten - in this game. Which means any new contender should broaden the limits of the game. From what has been stated as Kosmix' capability - "Web content, which includes news, videos, reviews, opinions, and communities, is aggregated by the search engine to offer the user deeper understanding of the subject he/she is looking up." - I have pretty much made up my mind that it will be as cluttered a page as yahoo. So, no, Kosmix will remain a Cuil. And how "intelligent" can the algo be to be able to decide how deep a user wants content about a topic. I do not want a search engine to load "modules" of data without my permission. Finally, $20 million when the rest of the economy is experiencing cardiac arrest shows that the only section of the US that is loaded, is entertainment. So Kosmix, in all likelihood, will end up as an internal tool to index the many video and audio clips that these entertainment behemoths generate.
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lakka
,Windsor, on Dec 10, 2008 04:13 PM
"Kosmix is optimistic about being able to cruise ahead of Google. " too much optimism eh ?
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