Readers on the look-out for new and more effective ways to search for information on the web may be excited to hear about Kosmix, a new start-up to emerge out of Silicon Valley. Already generating a healthy amount of conversation across message boards, some are praising Kosmix as the next challenger to possibly turn Google from its throne. However, co-founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman are quick to point out that they have different intentions.

Kosmix is not out to compete with the Google giant, rather, it wants to revolutionise the way people use the internet to search. Instead of focusing on key-words to generate multiple search entries, Kosmix aims to provide users with an automatically generated comprehensive multi-media page on a certain entered search. Take, for example, a travel destination entered by a user. The resulting compiled Kosmix page would provide not only travel and restaurant recommendations, but a rich variety of other media, visible to the user at one glance: Blogs, photos, and local information such as popular music or weather reports.

Using Kosmix

Intrigued by this new way to search, I decided to see for myself what kind of results I can expect from the same topic entered into the Kosmix system as opposed to the Google system—the results?

Take a relevant subject such as “time management.” Entered into Kosmix, the topic quickly generated a page that provided an overview, videos, forum posts and a link for blogs, as well as six major related topics with their own links (such as project management and business software.) The links and topics and connections were easy to navigate, making this an ideal system for finding related links with a clear path back to the source.

Essentially, it comes down to user preference, because a search entered into Google did not yield vastly different results: This also generated the Wikipedia definitions, the YouTube videos, the pdf articles and then related topics down on the bottom of the page. However, for users who wish to see different medias and sources grouped, or who are interested in a variety of different angles and interpretations of the same subject, Kosmix may be a more helpful way to search, without having to hunt all over the web.

Readers interested in learning more about Kosmix can click here to read the full New York Times Online article:

Just Don’t Compare Kosmix to Google By Miguel Helft

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