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
Gazerk officially launched today. w00t! As noted in the press release, Kosmix provides the technology infrastructure for Gazerk and I am very excited to be the product manager for Kosmix's Video Game search. Check out your favorite game. The results are organized into general search results (the "games" category), screenshots, cheats, reviews, forums, and blogs. Now instead of schlepping through pages of results in Google or reforming your query, you can get a quick view of all the different the angles available on the Web for your query. Actually, I recently had a personal success with Gazerk. After listening to Martin Yeung, I wanted a midi of the SMB2 ending song. I tried the query "super mario bros 2 ending song" on Google and Yahoo, but wasn't able to find what I wanted. Gazerk found the file right away!
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