Kosmix Launches UI!

Kosmix.com has launched with a completely redesigned UI. You’ll also notice that, in addition to Kosmix Health, we’ve also launched alpha versions of Kosmix Travel and Kosmix Politics. I’m really excited to share these new flavors of search with you. Keep in mind that this is only the beginning: someday, we’ll categorize everything on the Web (muhaha).

Kosmix Health was the first product we launched at Kosmix. Type in a health condition or disease and see different perspectives. Notice that you don’t have to type in a lot of terms to find what you want. Instead of typing in “diabetes symptoms”, just try “diabetes” and let our categorization technology do the work for you.

Kosmix Travel is an exciting new release, especially given my background at SideStep. As you know if you’ve tried to find travel information online, there’s a lot of spam out there because everyone’s trying to sell you something. At Kosmix, we’re making an effort to crawl the Web for all the best travel content. We’ll be refining our current categories and adding many more in the coming months. If you have any suggestions for additional categories, let me know!

Kosmix Politics is really my favorite. Type in a political subject and get liberal, conservative, or libertarian opinions from think-tanks, news sources, blogs, grass roots organizations, and more. Keep in mind that the search is just flavored with a certain slant. We’re not making a claim that  conservatives believe in intelligent design or that allall liberals believe that the Bush administration is a theocracy, but that’s the way the chatter is going on the Web. Also, the political search is currently tuned towards American politics. Keep checking back, because our coverage is expanding every day!

Questions? Answered!

Now for a response to some common questions I’m getting. I often see Kosmix compared to a clustering engine like Clusty. Clustering is a neat technology, but our algorithmic categorization is decidedly different. All clustering is done real-time on the query. Because our data is persistent, we can do a lot of neat things with it—keep checking back for some of our ideas. Also, clustering can cause some funky results with certain terms. For example, I’ve noticed recently in Clusty that “Australia” is showing up in the top clusters for “Diabetes.”

A lot of my friends have asked me: what makes Kosmix different from Google? Kosmix has discovered a way to categorize Web pages based on what they mean, not just what they say. Google’s algorithms are largely dependent on text. A good example of this is in politics. Do a search for global warming and check out the different viewpoints from liberal, conservative, and libertarian perspectives. You’ll notice that many of the pages we return don’t have the text “conservative” or “liberal” on them, but we our algorithms are able to figure out whether a page has a liberal slant. 

The biggest difference between Kosmix and Google can be summed up on our respective homepages. Google’s second button is named “I’m feeling lucky.” Google’s goal is to figure out what you want in the first result (or at least the top ten) and deliver it to you. This works really well for navigational queries where you know exactly what you want (e.g. what’s US Air’s Web site? I need the number to the Westin St. Francis). At Kosmix, we believe that most of the interesting questions you ask are informational in nature: you don’t know the answer to the question and you want to explore from different points of view. At Kosmix, we promise to help you in your journey to finding the answers that are right for you—and hopefully we’ll show you a few interesting tidbits along the way.

See more at Demo 2006 tomorrow!

Kosmix: Search less. Get more.

 -Mark Johnson

Product Manager, Kosmix.com

Technorati tags: Demo 2006, Search, Vertical Search

Comments

[mark]

Hmmm---I got the same exact comment from Gurudatt...word for word.