Kosmix Releases Smart Search
You may remember that in February, Kosmix unveiled a new kind of search engine, which separates the Web into categories that helped a user to navigate through complicated queries in health, travel, and politics. Since we were introducing a new dimension to search, we tried to keep the UI paradigm similar to what you might find in a typical search engine: a top ten list of results with the categories to the left as a filter. But, today we've decided to make good on our promise to break out of the "tyranny of the top ten." Welcome to the newest innovation from Kosmix, Smart Search!
The idea behind Smart Search is simple: when users ask a general quesiton, there's a lot of information out on the Web. It's important to expose as much knowledge as possible (without exposing too much!), to give a user an idea about which paths (s)he can travel. By showing categories like symptoms and treatments, we get users to answers to common questions quicker than with multiple queries in a typical search engine. By exposing a less popular category like Alternative Medicine, we show a user useful information that they might have never thought to look for. We can even be smart about when to show a user this view: if there aren't enough categories, then we can throw someone back to a more traditional classic view.
Oh, but we aren't done yet! Look at the right side of the search results on a query like "kidney stones." By using the power of the Web, we're able to infer that kidney stones are best treated by the gastroinurinary department of the hospital and can show the top hospitals in the US for the department. We don't have any fancy, human-curated mappings to do this: we let the Web tell us the most appropriate department. Expect many more cool applications in the future from Kosmix that harness the power of the Web to make intelligent decisions.
Of course, we realize this is a small step in the right direction. We haven't solved all the problems of the search interface, but thank goodness someone decided that a top ten list with titles, snippets, URLs, and ads wasn't the end-game for search. What a boring world that would be! If you've got ideas about how we can use our categorization technology to improve the search interface, leave a comment or drop me a line at mark at. . well, you can figure out the rest!
Oh, finally, did you notice that we launched Autos as our sixth vertical? The latest addition to our vertical line-up will help you to research a new car, figure out what's wrong with your old clunker, and even get you to the fan club for that classic sitting in your garage. For the sixth time, we prove that we ain't just another health search engine. We're the real deal!
Cheers!
Mark Johnson
Product Manager, Kosmix.com
Technorati Tags: verticalsearch kosmix ui searchinterface
