Kosmix A Threat To Google?

Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the co-founders of Kosmix, may well be happy just for the fact that the title sounds flattering. That’s not because other start-ups making similar assertions have fallen short of the target, but rather, because Kosmix is trying to do something that is quite different from traditional Web search.

What Is Kosmix?

Kosmix’s home page offers a mix of news, entertainment and other content from around the Web. An average page can have several sources of information, each with multiple entries. But it is on searches that Kosmix becomes really interesting.

Type in “Manila”, for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a Google Map showing you it’s location, restaurant recommendations, photographs and videos from services like Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube, audio clips of local music, reviews of guidebooks, hotels and other services, blog posts, Tweets on Twitter, Profiles from Linkedin and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics. Kosmix is almost like creating a guide just for you. Go ahead just try it and you will see what I mean. Here, I I’ll make it easier for you. Click this Kosmix search of Manila (a new window will appear).

Mr. Harinarayan quoted on New York Times:

Search (Google) does what it does well, very well, Mr. Harinarayan said. I don’t think we can ever compete with that. Kosmix, he said, is not about finding the best set of documents for a specific keyword or phrase. Instead, its goal is to tell me more about something, he said. For a key word or topic that a user enters, Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.

And so, a threat or not, Kosmix has just increased the ante on how we should see Search Engines in the future.

Here’s a hint: Type-in a keyword such as Internet Marketing and see the results. Look particularly on the right hand side where it says related topics. Do they sound like good keywords for you to use on your SEO?