Kosmix.com – search, and crucially, context
Kosmix.com is a new startup that’s trying to shake Google’s dominance of the search market. Good luck with that, guys. However, I rather suspect that their real agenda, to take an analogy with politics, is more similar to the Green Party’s approach to Labour and the Conservatives. It’s trying to change things not by grabbing a majority share, but by innovating and passing popular ideas up to the people at the top.
Kosmix is trying to change search by providing context to your results. On the results page, you get a list of (Google’s) search results, as well as relevant forum posts (from Omgili), Q&As (from Yahoo! Answers), Videos (from BlinkX, YouTube and Truveo), Images (from Yahoo!) and News and Blogs (from MeeHive). There’s other resources too, depending on what you search for.
When you do a search on the site, you’ve also got the option to drill down a little further. If you’re interested specifically in “Media”, “News & Blogs”, or “Opinion & Discussion”, then there’s a button to click to narrow down results into one of those categories.
Will it ever challenge Google’s dominance? Very unlikely. Will Google be paying attention and ‘borrowing’ the best features? Almost certainly. The most that Kosmix can hope for is that Google will buy it. That’s possible, but the site still has a little way to go yet.
Kosmix (via the Guardian)
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