Comments on: Will Kosmix’s Plan To Take Vertical Search Horizontal Go Flat?

By: Kosmix Goes Horizontal: tech product reviews, tech news, daily videos, free downloads, and podcasts, tech, products, computer, mp3 players, cell phones, digital cameras

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:59:26 +0000

[...] move has been anticipated since at least last September, and was described by co-founder Anand Rajaraman in a Beet.tv interview posted less than a week [...]

By: Kosmix Goes Horizontal

Kosmix Goes Horizontal — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:06:49 +0000

[...] move has been anticipated since at least last September, and was described by co-founder Anand Rajaraman in a Beet.tv interview posted less than a week [...]

By: What Investment Bankers Actually Do | Mergers & Inquisitions

What Investment Bankers Actually Do | Mergers & Inquisitions — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:15:00 +0000

[...] Medellin would be WebVan. Or maybe Kosmix. [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 08:10:07 +0000

At CureHunter we take it one step further and use text mining to determine what the peer-reviewed research says the best drugs and treatment options for specific diseases are.

By quantifying results we are eliminating the need for patients to browse through endless search results.

By: Unity Stoakes

Unity Stoakes — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:55:55 +0000

We just launched a human-powered, doctor-reviewed search service for health today and would welcome any feedback. Judging from the above posts, there seems to be a number of strong opinions about this.

http://www.organizedwisdom.com

Mahalo is doing something similar, but across all categories. And we have added in a doctor-review as part of our process which we think is essential for health.

Our goal is to layer on a smart service on top of the great work that some of the algorithms do. We also think our approach is a lot less cluttered than what Kosmix, Google, or any of the machine-generated search results are doing.

Also, try to search for user-generated content on one of the vertical search engines. It’s pretty scary.

We’re in early beta and we know we have a lot of work to do…

By: Anand Rajaraman

Anand Rajaraman — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:24:18 +0000

Nick, thanks for writing about Kosmix. Would like to respond to some of the questions raised in the article as well as in the comments.

A fair question, raised both in the post and in reader comments, is how does Kosmix compare with vertical search engines and vertically-focused knowledge bases. Kosmix differs fundamentally in that we aggregate data across a variety of sources: we crawl a large portion of the web (several billion URLs) and index RSS feeds (hundreds of thousands), in addition to content licensed from specialized vendors such as ADAM (high-quality health content). Due to this breadth of content available to our engine, we can provide a great Topic Homepage that is an ideal point to start exploring a topic; in many cases our Topic Homepage is more informative than either vertically focused search engines or knowledge-bases. For e.g., check out the Topic Homepage on “wrist pain” (http://www.kosmix.com/Health/wrist_pain-s?). It compares favorably with the corresponding page on the more vertically focused sites.

I can cite many such examples. Not suprising: all we’re saying is that the aggregation of all the knowledge available on the web, packaged and presented well, is more informative than any single site.

It is also instructive to compare Kosmix with Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a fantastic resource for factual information (which we often include in our topic pages), but their remit does not include subjective content, videos, widgets, or communities.

There are some questions concerning UI and layout, as well as business model. The frank answer to these is, we are still experimenting with the UI and the business model. We test new features and new layouts all the time using controlled A/B tests. Our UI has evolved significantly over the past several months and will continue to do so. Our challenge is to find a way to present a lot of aggregated information on a topic without overwhelming users while still putting the information at their fingertips.

As you can imagine, this is not an easy problem, but one we believe is worth tackling. We welcome your feedback and suggestions for improving our service; please email us at: feedback AT kosmix DOT com.

By: Steve Ballmer

Steve Ballmer — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:11:29 +0000

Huh?
I don’t think I even understand the question….
Well, it’s not MS, it’s bad!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

By: Suzanne G

Suzanne G — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:14:39 +0000

Can an algorithmic generated page be as useful as a human created page?

By: LogoSnob2.0

LogoSnob2.0 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 21:13:53 +0000

:: clicks to see site ::
For a second there, I thought Friday’s end of Happy Hour came early.

OK that is just waaaaay too much reflective surface on that logo. Takes the Web 2.0 logo stylization to a whole new bad level.

By: Jon Kelly

Jon Kelly — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:50:22 +0000

I couldn’t disagree more on the layout. I think it looks like a total mess. The key to offering a good experience in a vertical is to know what’s important in that vertical and then distill the information for consumers into something that makes sense. Offer 300 links on a page doesn’t really help me get to the heart of a topic.

By: Jon Glosser

Jon Glosser — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 20:31:52 +0000

david, i agree their business model is suspect but their product looks pretty cool. nice clean layout, everything well organized. they’ve done a nice job of aggregating content from various sources: http://www.kosmix.com/Health/prostate_cancer-s

By: Steve Larsen

Steve Larsen — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 19:14:04 +0000

WRT Bob Walters post saying: “People are just going to use Google no matter how great a vertical search is.”

This reminds me of the television network executives response to the launch of CNN. They called it the “Chicken Noodle Network” and said people would only trust a broadcast network for their news. Today people DO watch CNN for news - and, ESPN for sports, Discovery Channel for nature programing, DIY Network for home improvement, etc. etc. And trust me, people WILL use vertical search engines and are already.

By: ElyFall

ElyFall — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:28:23 +0000

Seriously, if people took a few moments to sit and truly think, they would come up with amazing products.

By: Water Subject

Water Subject — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:28:04 +0000

whats the logic of linking to crunchbase if the company profile is not there yet?
may be you could give direct link to company than making us retype the adress after facing an empty crunchbase.

By: David

David — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:24:04 +0000

Unfortunately, the business model is just adsense. Where is this going?

By: CaliforniaKid

CaliforniaKid — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:52:23 +0000

“Their strategy is to create a series of targeted topic pages with relevant links, groups, and media.”

That is absolutely amazing! And “easily indexable by Google?” Amazing. Its just a shame Wikipedia has been doing this since 2001.

By: Derrick Shields

Derrick Shields — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:45:25 +0000

Sounds more like Squidoo than anything else.

By: Doug Mehus

Doug Mehus — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 17:44:17 +0000

Kosmix seems more like Marchex with its OpenList technology. It’s way to make vertically-targeted auto-generated pages for domain squatters to put up on thousands of domains, without them looking like traditional domain squatting pages vis a vis “domainsponsor.com”. They’ve improved upon the format and they’ll be a niche success, like Marchex, but I can’t see them ever being huge.

Cheers,
Doug

By: Faisal

Faisal — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:39:24 +0000

If you have done enough research you will realize this is nothing new and Teoma (Acquired by ASK in 2001) has been doing it since day one.

Kosmix and ASK use almost the same algorithm , difference is Kosmix calls it Topics and ASK calls it Communities.

More info about ASK algorithm (found it online) :

Ask Jeeves also takes an interesting approach to the web. One that may also be superior to the more traditional algorithmic based engines. Ask Jeeves uses the idea that the web is a series of communities. Therefore they have structured their ranking systems around this idea of communities to determine relevance and authority on the web.

Because they consider the web to be comprised of multiple communities, pages or sites within a community should only related to each other, yet there could be some relation between communities.

A page or site with high inbound community links is considered “worth” more than a site with high inbound links that are not necessarily all community links.

By: BeingParents

BeingParents — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:38:01 +0000

What would be better is the build a homepage for lets say a search term that is searched at least 33,333 times a day . I think “every topic” is too much.

This could be huge success.

Who do others think ?

By: Rob Walters

Rob Walters — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:34:16 +0000

People are just going to use Google no matter how great a vertical search is.

By: NeoTechie

NeoTechie — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:24:56 +0000

Smart move guys. Who wants to take on Google ? Okay, I think we have a few takes ,but they are all aged. Cooperating and collaborating is the way to go. To become successful,we sometimes have to learn and work with those who are successful.

Anyway, a site for every topic sound great but that could lead to some clutter.Simplicity is the key. That is how Google has become so success.
SIMPLE SELLS.

By: whoopie

whoopie — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 16:17:30 +0000

wheeee, autogenerated topic pages. is it 2002 again? its always obvious when you look at these pages that they are crawl spew. they are cheap to put up but no one looks at them. even google news with its rich pedigree and unlimited budget still falls short of delivering a decent ordering of stories you get from anyone who has actually shelled out for the reuters feed