Kosmix: The Web Organized For You

[mkrishnan]

Kosmix is a web start-up that essentially tries to improve on the information finding process on the internet by generating a page that tries to organize information found by searching into a usable format. The NYT covered this start-up this weekend...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15ping.html

KOSMIX, a well-financed Silicon Valley start-up, is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google.

As flattering as that notion may sound, it rankles Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix. And that’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen laughably short of the mark. It’s because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.

“Search does what it does well, very well,” Mr. Harinarayan said. “I don’t think we can ever compete with that.” Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to “tell me more about something,” he said.

For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.

I gave this site a try -- I actually didn't find any hits on it here at MR, and I hadn't heard about it at all. It's actually pretty interesting -- the information really is presented in a much more usable format right off the bat, than a web search. It seems like the concept has some real potential behind it.

 

[Blue Velvet]

What do we think?

 

[mkrishnan]

Now that's just creepy! I feel much as if you'd turned a video camera back on its monitor, creating an endless loop into which souls might well be lost.