The US media world is suddenly buzzing with reports of Kosmix, a new search engine that could change the way people search the web and find information. The main goal of Kosmix is to make finding information on the web more user friendly.
So far, the biggest online search engine “Google” operates on the following principle to search anything online.
“Finding the best set of documents for an input keyword or phrase”
As a result, Google brings hundreds of results in front of the user and the user can only visit some of them.
In contrast to this, Kosmix gathers content from across the web and shows a page after creating a multimedia encyclopaedia entry in real time. For example search for rediff.com and you will get a lot of different content, photos, videos and links.
It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics. Kosmix gives more information about any subject. For many queries, the results are satisfactory and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.
Behind the Scenes – Working Principle:
Kosmix has a specialized technology for its service. It has created a set of nearly five million categories on various topics. When someone searches on Kosmix, it automatically knows on which category the information may have. It takes content from web sites as well as from specialized Web services, and databases connected to the Internet.
Interested to explore more?
Read more about Kosmix at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Content ideas for this post sourced from: http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/mar/20/will-kosmix-be-google-nemesis.htm
2 comments
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March 25, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Gabriel Weinberg
Also check out our new search engine, Duck Duck Go: http://duckduckgo.com/
I’d love to get your feedback on it. For more info about us, check out: http://duckduckgo.com/about.html
Gabriel Weinberg, Founder & CEO
June 12, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Eric
Everything at Kosmix is nofollowed – a strong signal they are no competitor to any search engine. More of a portal than a search engine.
I almost wasn’t even going to check out duckduckgo.com, but I really like it! very clean, I wish it detected my window size and would center vertically better, but once there are results it’s very nice. Sucky name IMO, but I would have said that about ebay or amazon long ago too (google was cool from the get-go).
The really big name opportunity is to get q.com, and negotiate with firefox to let it just be “Q”, not even having to do the .com. Microsoft might even allow that in ie because any move against google probably helps them more than hurts them. Right now q.com is wasted by going to Qwest. I am guessing most people type out qwest, so q is pointless. Either Qwest should do a search engine play, or they should partner with someone, or they should sell it. It has the potential to become a contender if matched to an engine that offers something better than google, or different enough to matter.
A past lack on google’s part was searching for emails, but tests at cuil, duckduckgo and google today had google reporting about three times as many links for my personal email as anyone else.
Another past/current lack of google was any search where punctuation mattered, and Alta Vista was usually best with that. Not sure if they still are.
And my last SE wish item would be the ability to search for source on the page, like searching for anyone with 103bees code on their page for example. I currently don’t know a way to do that. One application would be as an author to look for pirates or plagerism etc. Another would be as a web designer looking for various implementations of something.