Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan both studied at Stanford university, at the same time as Lary Page and Sergey Brin.
Anand and Venky are launching a promising search engine called Kosmix. They hope to challenge Google that they judge not relevant enough.
Kosmix is basically a search engine whose main feature is the categorization of pages in different categories/sections, and then allow the user to choose the category his query is related to when searching. This is a really neat feature, as people are often frustrated when they don’t get the information they need, for example receiving only search results about products for sale, other that purely informative pages.
Also, Kosmix is different than Google as it will rely less on popularity (links, age, etc) to rank results.
According to today’s article in Mercury News:
Kosmix hopes to make online search even better and more relevant than Google — especially when people are researching information on specific topics. So far, Google, has searched for pages based on a sort of popularity contest. You enter a word or phrase, and Google will search its database of Web pages to find out which pages with that word or phrase have been linked to the most. Google has made many refinements, but a page’s popularity — not necessarily its content — still drives its approach.
Instead, the start-up has developed a new kind of technology called “categorization.”First, it asks users to define a category for a search. If a search term is related to health, for example, users can make a query in a health-related search box. That way, Kosmix can find Web pages that are more closely associated in meaning with the search terms.
Kosmix will also use the content of the page that’s linking to you in order to know what your page is about and then categorize it.
“Kosmix then looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying — to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If a page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can get enough information to categorize it by topic, Harinarayan says.”
Kosmix hopes to help people find more relevant results by allowing them to narrow their search with the category feature. Kosmix is currently testing their first search engine based on health. They are planning on adding different categories throughout the year. I tried their health search engine at www.kosmix.com and I have to admit that they have done a very good job. It’s a very comprehensive and intuitive search engine, when you do a search, it presents you all kind of categories, such as “Symptoms”, “Definitions, “Case Studies”, or even “Blogs”.
For example, say you are researching prostate cancer. Type in “prostate cancer” into Google, and you get millions of results, and most on the first page are highly relevant — offering information about symptoms and treatments. But it is hard to know what comes after the first page, without doing a lot of scanning.Type “prostate cancer” into Kosmix’s health search, and you’ll get relevant pages straight off, but also a helpful categorization of results along the left-hand column, including things like “men’s health,” indicating it is a male problem, “alternative medicine,” something you may not have thought about looking for, “blogs” and “message boards.”
It seems like a very promising search engine, I really wish them good luck. They are doing something that none amongst the big three Search engines has tried to do yet, being too focused on purchasing other services than investing money in research.