Here comes Kosmix.
That’s the news doing rounds everywhere on the World Wide Web and even outside the web.
So what is Kosmix?
Kosmix is a newest kid on the search block. However, it would be wrong to call it just another search engine. Founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, Kosmix is not a traditional search engine. In words of Chris Shipley, from the consulting firm Guidewire, “It is Wikipedia meets Google search meets Answers.com”. In short, it’s a well-crafted magazine on topics searched.
Unlike Google, Kosmix is not about finding the most relevant single piece of information; it's about organizing the Web so that one can discover relevant pieces of information. Infact, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopaedia entry for any keyword.
We did our own bit of research to test Kosmix. Here are the takeaways:
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Kosmix has a pleasant user interface. It shows text, images and videos in a magazine style layout.
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The results are a mix of web search results, blogs, news, videos, images, audios, conversations, tweets, community results, reviews, how-tos, shopping results and other related topics.
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It might not be as effective for long tail keywords where one is looking for a specific document, as it is for topics where one would want to browse information.
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The time Kosmix takes to throw back relevant results is much higher than Google. This is an area where improvement is required.
We did a simultaneous search on Kosmix and Google for the term Food Pyramid. Here’s a snapshot of how different the results looked.
All in all, pretty impressive. Let’s see how well it is accepted by the loyal Google users.
