|
|
| BUSINESS - US INDIAN BUSINESS |
| Kosmix Puts the ‘Browse’ in Browser | | By ASHFAQUE SWAPAN | | | indiawest.com | April 16, 2009 03:01:00 PM |
|
You know the feeling. You need to find out more about some stuff, and you quickly “google” a keyword.
On a bad day, you’ll get answers all right — likely over a million — but as you skim through page after page of lists of links which are of little value but just has the keyword present in some tangential away, you are ready to throw up your arms in frustration. Don’t you wish something more sentient than a dumb computer program had put this stuff together so you could actually find out more about something rather than have to plow through pages and pages of useless stuff?
 Well, somebody has, and it’s called Kosmix. The well-financed Silicon Valley start-up “is often described on blogs and news sites as a search engine that may someday rival Google,” according to a recent New York Times report.
“We really see ourselves as a companion to Google in many ways as opposed to a competitor,” Jodi Olson, who works for Kosmix, told India-West. “There are two different search paradigms on the Web. One is when you search, and that’s when you want to find something.”
Venky Harinarayan, one of the co-founders of Kosmix.com, explained with an example from outside the Internet.
“If you look at the offline world you have Yellow Pages, right? So if you’re looking for a plumber, you open your Yellow Pages, find ‘P,’ go to plumbers, and pick one and call them, right? So the way the Web is right now is more along those lines — it is a very search-find-transact sort of model,” Harinarayan told India-West during an interview.
“But . . . you don’t open Yellow Pages to get to learn more about something, you don’t open Yellow Pages to browse it, Yellow Pages don’t have any notion of editors or organization.”
What Kosmix offered, he said, was a different experience.
“Today, on the Web, people are compelled to browse and discover using the Yellow Pages, in effect, right?” he said.
“What we are trying to do is really provide that editorial packaging and organization —yes, we do it algorithmically and in automated fashion — but it’s fundamentally very different in terms of use for the consumer — it’s all about browse, not about find.”
India-West did a few searches to find out the difference, and sure enough, there was a difference.
A search of “Shah Rukh Khan” on Google turned up over 7 million results, but how does that help? On the first page, some links sound interesting, for instance, the Wikipedia entry on top, and there are clusters of news results and the odd video, but the Kosmix search results opening page beats the Google equivalent hands down.
First off, the results are more well organized and visually pleasing.
At the top left is the official fan Web site, and next is our old friend, the Wikipedia entry.
Below are a bunch of news links from meehive.com.
Scroll down, and there are at least a dozen video links from popular video sites like YouTube, Truveo and Blinkx.
There are a bunch of links on current chats going on over Twitter, links to social network Web pages on MySpace and Facebook, and for those who love to shop, a Shah Rukh Khan 2009 calendar (current bid $9.91) and a pillowcase (current bid $13.99) from eBay, or a coffee table book, “The Inner Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan” ($39.99), from Amazon.
Now, if you wanted to find out more about the Bollywood Badshah, which page would you choose?
Kosmix seems to work well for relatively esoteric searches as well. Let’s take Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate writer lionized in India and Bangladesh but not exactly a household name in the West anymore.
Google, bless its virtual heart, comes up with 1.2 million hits, but its opening page is again a mixed bag, and devoid of visual images.
The Wikipedia link is solid, as is the Nobel Prize Web site link. There are a couple of more interesting links, but that’s about it.
The Kosmix search results on the opening page are an impressive improvement. In addition to the link to Wikipedia, it has a number of links to images, but most impressive are its video results, which includes a link to the 50-minute documentary on Tagore by Satyajit Ray on Truveo as well as a news video on the theft of his Nobel medal from Santiniketan.
Its greatest asset is the “Related in the Kosmos” category which has links to other Bengali Nobel laureates (economists Amartya Sen, Muhammad Yunus) songs by Tagore, people associated with Santiniketan, the university founded by Tagore, and links to Bengali literature.
In a word, a fairly content-rich substantive set of links useful for educating yourself on Tagore.
Harinarayan said he was happy with the progress of Kosmix.
“We just launched the full product in December of last year. We’re not using any numbers yet, but we have been extremely happy with the usage so far,” he told India-West.
Harinarayan has a bachelor’s degree from IIT Madras, and came to the U.S. in 1986. After two years at UCLA, where his advisor was one of the founding scientists of the Internet, Leonard Kleinrock, he enrolled in Stanford after a stint of working in the Silicon Valley.
Harinarayan co-founded Kosmix with his longtime colleague Anand Rajaraman. The two met at Stanford.
“We built our entire product on proprietary technology and algorithms that we have put together over a period of time,” Harinarayan explained.
They have a formidable track record. The two founded Junglee, a provider of database technology to help consumers find products on the Internet, while at Stanford. Online retailing giant Amazon acquired Junglee for 1.6 million shares of stock.
Their proprietary technology essentially files and organizes information about millions and millions of topics, and identifies multiple connections.
“By scouring the Web, the company has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese,” the New York Times reported. “The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet.”
Their Web site RightHealth, which uses this technology, has become the number two Web site for people who go to the Web to seek health information, with 10 million visits a month.
“Let’s say when we started, like three or four years ago, the vision was very simple. What we said was that the Web is incredibly powerful, it’s like the library of Alexandria . . . it’s fundamentally the repository of all human knowledge in one place,” Harinarayan told India-West.
“To have just one way to access that didn’t feel right. We right now have only one window into this thing, which is search. Let’s try and create another window where we feel like people can fundamentally access this information in a very different way, and that’s sort of the genesis of what we are doing at Kosmix.
“I think it’s pretty simple. I think we really want to bring browse back to the Web, it is something that we feel is essential. People just don’t want to be very transactional and find and search and find all the time. People also like to explore. And wherever people are browsing, we wanted to be able to use Kosmix to effectively discover stuff that they would never have discovered otherwise. I mean that’s the only vision that we have.” |
| | |
|
|