New specialist search engine: Kosmix

[jaski]

[kosmix.com...]
Couldn't find any reference to this one on WW.

Searching 2,736,200,561 web pages to bring you complete information about every health topic

They claim its a health search engine .. but I searched for some other sector keywords and it came up with an OK set of results for that as well.

[mooret]

I have no idea what its trying to be.

Results appear for non medical things aswell as medical things.

[engine]

...A new search engine launched here from Mountain View, Calif.-based Kosmix provides categorized results instead of showing linear results.

Kosmix Search currently provides search for three verticals: health, politics and travel.

[pcmag.com...]

[TheGuyAboveYou]

More boys from Standford grad school. Now Stanford's cs department claims:
Google, Yahoo, Kozmix and , I am sure, more internet companies.

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Not bad. My spammy sites are not even listed!

[Dayo_UK]

Not bad serps - but how does a new search engine get any market share :(

[Freedom]

This search engine has been out since November. At first, I thought they were a health search engine, and now they seem to want to become a search engine with a bunch of niche channels under it. However, with over 2 billion pages, they aren't that selective on health and medical information. A vertical (niche) engine this is not, otherwise, why be all inclusive? There's too many snake oil salesmen NOT to be selective when you are medical search engine.

They trumpet the fact they are using "categories" as the main force in their algo, but I have a feeling the next generation of search is going to be beyond categories.

All in all, tho, it's not bad. I just think they have an identity problem. Early articles profiled them as a health search engine, recent articles lean more towards a search engine with niche channels. - So which is it?

[Kangol]

Not bad at all,
I did a search on a a heavy spammed prescription drug and the results are more then ok.

[carguy84]

Health, Travel and Politics.

Sweet, the 3 most spammed topics.

[christopher w]

Health, Travel and Politics.

Sweet, the 3 most spammed topics.

Don't you mean:

Health, Travel and Porn

[TheGuyAboveYou]

Here is one of the founders patents:

[patft.uspto.gov...]

This is from when he was at Amazon. Hope he doesn't
"borrow" any of his work from Amazon.

[McMohan]

And they are already a PR0. Google, they deserve a fair treatment, don't they?

[Namaste]

all Indian crew...way to go boys

[lexipixel]

Another patent to throw out --- although, since the site wil join the hundreds of engines that make up the 2% of non-major engine searching, I don't think anyone will care.

[junai3]

My searches didn't return the best sites. Why are travel sites coming up when you search under health?

[simon2263]

The back-end logic of the travel section is hard to figure out. To start with, you can type any keyword into the search box, not just locations. For example, I typed "villa" and got about 24K results. Then i clicked on the "kid-friendly" category - the top result in this category is <snip>
which doesn't mention being kid-friendly in anyway at all, although there is a little search box at the bottom of the page that mentions finding children's activities.

I would guess that there is some basic web page classification technique being used during crawling, with bog-standard full-text indexing, plus some simple keyword-based categorization. Not terribly interesting in that case, since it doesn't really push the boundaries on search engine technology. Also, a bit slow last night (up to 5-6 seconds to get search results listing).

[edited by: engine at 11:09 am (utc) on Feb. 18, 2006]
[edit reason] no specifics, thanks. [/edit]

[weeks]

I had a similar product at one time. They were wise to select health, as we did, because it's easy to filter out the spam and bring up some quality. I've noticed, however, that Google has refined its filters in the top health categories. Yahoo is doing better, too.

Politics and travel are a good idea, too. Again, lots of spam in many results.

Still, like I figured out, if you carve out a tiny market share in search, G and Y will come and eat your lunch and dinner, too. Without breathing hard.