Kosmix Blog

By: Venky

Last week, Anand and I decided to play hookey and jet down to Carlsbad, California, for The Wall Street Journal’s premier tech conference: AllThingsD. This is was my first D Conference and I was very impressed by the quality of the attendees and the speakers. The format was Kara Swisher or Walt Mossberg interviewing celebrity CEOs.

The celebrity CEOs interviews we saw: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Michael Dell, Barry Diller (IAC), Jeff Bewkes (TimeWarner), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Rupert Murdoch (News Corp)..

Here are some interesting lines that I recall from the conference:

"You are a public company, you get a 60% premium, you spend 3 months trying to find an alternative, you don't. What do you do? You say yes", both Diller and Murdoch.

"Is Google Voldemort?” – Walt Mossberg to Jerry Yang, since both Jerry and Steve Ballmer kept referring to Google as the “Market Leader”, similar to the “One who must not be named” in Harry Potter.

"Driving a 2 ton vehicle to get your 2 pound package from the store is the worst logistics system invented" -- Jeff Bezos. Walt Mossberg had the perfect comeback -- "doesn't sound like a 60 ton UPS truck delivering that 2 pound package is much better". Of course Jeff came back with the USPS stops at every house.

"We have built a core infrastructure in SEO and SEM, so we can take a new effort, and spin it up very quickly" -- Barry Diller, trying to articulate what connects all those disparate IAC properties.

"We look at any financial option, whether it be IPO, investment, acquisition, and see if it will get us to our vision quicker. It's interesting, if and only if it does. The IPO, investment, acquisition is not interesting in its own right" -- Mark Zuckerberg, the youngest CEO with the clearest answer.

"We didn’t buy Alaska to save two elk” – Rupert Murdoch.

I also chatted on the sidelines with Jeff Bezos, Don Graham (Chairman of the Washington Post), Steve Case (Revolution Health), Adam Lashinsky (Fortune magazine), Jessica V (Wall Street Journal reporter covering Google, Yahoo!), Matt Marshall (Venturebeat), Om Malik (Gigaom) and more...

All in all, a great week in sunny southern California!

By: Nicky

If getting news alerts in your email inbox were a drug, I might qualify as a junkie. On a day-to-day basis, I get messages concerning the weather, the environment, the election, places to travel far and wide, an update on what’s going on in Silicon Valley, and yes, info on my favorite guilty pleasure, MTV’s The Hills (I would like to think that it takes a special kind of woman to admit to this particular interest on her first Kosmix blog post).

I also search the web, proactively seeking out stories that my alerts missed in my quest to get my daily dose of domestic and global news. I dutifully track down the stories that matter to me, day, after day, after day, after…well, you get the gist.

So here’s a question – why does getting my news work this way? Why does it require me to search for my interests online or clutter up my email inbox in the process? Sure, I am willing to go the extra mile for my news right now, spending the time necessary to track down what’s most important to me, but some days I’m too busy and some days, I just don’t feel like doing all that work.

In a perfect world, the latest information would come directly to me in a tidy package comprised of a killer UI and a console that allowed me to manage all of my interests easily. In the same way I pick up the phone and the dial tone signals that it’s ready to connect me to all of the people in my life, there could be a place online that would connect me to all of my news interests. Not just the big headlines, although I would certainly find those there too, but also the niche ‘nano-interests’ that belong solely to me.

I would love to tell you that this idea, a sort of ‘personalized news dial tone,’ was mine, and popped easily into my head one morning as I headed to work. Really it belongs to a team here at Kosmix that is developing a product that will meet all of the needs I have just detailed.

Interested in the concept and how it connects to other Kosmix properties like RightHealth, RightAutos, and RightTrips? Stay tuned – Kosmix is working on bringing your world, to you, just the way you like it (and because we’re nice people, MTV’s The Hills is strictly optional).

The Kosmix team has been working around the clock (with mandatory ping pong and beer breaks in between) for several months now. We are thrilled to announce the alpha launch of our horizontal offering, you can give it a whirl here: http://www.kosmix.com. Kosmix's mission in life is to intelligently organize the web for any topic that catches your fancy - easy, right?!

Are you a comedy fan? You might want to check out our topic page on George Carlin: http://kosmix.com/topic/george_carlin?

Astronomical gas prices got you down? Ditch that Hummer and learn all about the Toyota Prius here: http://kosmix.com/topic/toyota_prius?

We'd love to hear your feedback in the comments (you can also come by our offices and we'll offer you a very healthy Odwalla) - please note that this current incarnation is an early alpha version and we expect it to evolve significantly over the next few months. We know there are rough edges and your opinions will help us get to the next level.

We also believe that the new horizontal product will extend the great success we've had with our three vertical sites that reach over 15 million consumers every month as of March 2008: RightHealth,
RightAutos and RightTrips. Here is a fun Hitwise traffic chart that we sometimes gaze lovingly at, to the mild annoyance of our significant others and close friends.

Gotta go now - ping pong beckons - but stay tuned! It's going to be a fun ride getting to the beta version.

Oh, we're just kidding, of course. We're too nice to call anyone a dummy, but we do enjoy a mildly jokey headline.

Anand Rajaraman - Kosmix co-founder and, more importantly, ping ponger with a mean backhand - recently wrote a post on his personal blog articulating some of the key details behind our alpha launch. We are cross posting it here without his permission (don't think he'll sue). If you haven't yet tried out our alpha product, you can do so here. You can also find Anand's entire library of musings here.

Searching for a Needle or Exploring the Haystack?

Search engines are great finding the needle in a haystack. And that's perfect when you are looking for a needle. Often though, the main objective is not so much to find a specific needle as to explore the entire haystack.

When we're looking for a single fact, a single definitive web page, or the answer to a specific question, then the needle-in-haystack search engine model works really well. Where it breaks down is when the objective is to learn about, explore, or understand a broad topic. For example:

* Hiking the Continental Divide Trail.
* A loved one recently diagnosed with arthritis.
* You read the Da Vinci code and have an irresistible urge to learn more about the Priory of Sion.
* Saddened by George Carlin's death, you want to reminisce over his career.

The web contains a trove of information on all these topics. Moreover, the information of interest is not just facts (e.g., Wikipedia), but also opinion, community, multimedia, and products. What's missing is a service that organizes all the information on a topic so that you can explore it easily. The Kosmix team has been working for the past year on building just such a service, and we put out an alpha yesterday. You enter a topic, and our algorithms assemble a "topic page" for that topic. Check out the pages for Continental Divide Trail, arthritis, Priory of Sion., and George Carlin.

The problem we're solving is fundamentally different from search, and we've taken a fundamentally different approach. As I've written before, the web has evolved from a collection of documents that neatly fit in a search engine index, to a collection of rich interactive applications. Applications such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Yelp. Instead of serving results from an index, Kosmix builds topic pages by querying these applications and assembling the results on-the-fly into a 2-dimensional grid. We have partnered with many of the services that appear in the results pages, and use publicly available APIs in other cases.

Here are some of the challenging problems that we had to tackle in building this product:

1. Figuring out which which applications are relevant to a topic. For example, Boorah, Yelp, and Google maps are relevant to the topic "restaurants 94041". WebMD, Mayo Clinic, and RightHealth are relevant to "arthritis". If we called each application for every query, the page would look very confusing, and our partners would get unhappy very quickly! I'll write more on how we do this in a separate post by itself, but it's very, very cool indeed.
2. Figuring out related topics in the Related in the Kosmos section on each Topic page. For example, you can start from the Priory of Sion and laterally explore Rosslyn Chapel or the Madonna of the Rocks.
3. Figuring out the placement and space allocation to each element in the 2-dimensional grid. Going from one dimension (linear list) to two dimensions (grid) turns out to be quite a challenge, both from an algorithmic and from a UI design point of view.

In this alpha, we taken a first stab at tackling these challenges. We are still several months from having a product that we feel is ready to launch, but we decided to put this public alpha out there to gather user feedback and tune our service. Many aspects of the product will evolve between now and then: Do we have the right user interaction model for topic exploration? Do we put too much information on the topic page? Should we present it very differently? How do we combine human experts with our algorithms?

Most importantly, the Kosmix approach does not work for every query! Our goal is to organize information around topics, not answer arbitrary search queries. How do we make the distinction clear in the product itself? Can we carve out a separate niche from search engines?

We hope to gain insight into all these and more questions from this alpha. Please use it and provide your feedback!

Before posting an entry exclusively dedicated to beer, we worried about our job security in this tepid environment.

Then we decided that the risk was, well, worth it. The recent news around the purchase of American icon Anheuser Busch by foreign brewer InBev has lots of people worried silly. Personally, we prefer our brew a bit stronger and darker but do appreciate the sentiment.

After all, it takes an exquisitely American company to make those wonderful ads.

We decided to take Kosmix for a spin. You can look at the topic page here.

Our personal favorites are the product search and the "American Heroes" advertising audio clips (powered by TheFind and Seeqpod, respectively) but you make your own decisions!

By: Nicky.

In my last blog post, I detailed in a rather cryptic fashion the concept of a ‘Personalized News Dial Tone.’ I explained that in much the same way that your phone instantly connects you to the people in your life, Kosmix is working on a product that instantly connects you to all of your news interests that change around you every moment of the day.

Since it’s Monday morning and I have 2.5 cups of coffee (read: personality) running blissfully through my veins, now seems the perfect time to tell you a bit more about what we’ve been doing with this product - which we’ve named MeeHive.

Why MeeHive? Well, think of a Bee Hive, a place that is so full of frenzied activity that it literally buzzes, and then imagine that we offered you your very own hive where you could collect stories that interest you. That would make you buzz, wouldn’t it?

We debuted MeeHive at last month’s Under the Radar conference held at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View, CA. Under the Radar is dedicated to showcasing the industry’s up-and-coming players – the startups who are developing some of the freshest and most creative products out there.

Sesh, our fearless CTO, presented MeeHive as part of the ‘Graduate Circle,’ a forum for established companies like Kosmix to discuss how they got to be where they are and how they are continuing to innovate.

During his well-received presentation, Sesh described how in a world of ‘pull’ models, where you search the web high and low to get the information you want delivered to you, MeeHive is a news ‘push’ model – delivering fresh information to you all the time so that you don’t have to go looking for it.

He noted that with MeeHive’s ability to leverage the Kosmix user base and deliver uber-relevant results, it is well-positioned for success. Of course, we know that getting MeeHive to where we want it is a marathon, not a sprint, so we’ll be spending the summer building the most robust product we can in preparation for a launch not too far down the road. In the meantime, sign up for our beta and we’ll keep you posted on developments.