Rolling my eyes, I was miffed and tad annoyed at the question my friend asked, probably because it is the elephant in the office that other web companies inevitably face:

“So why would I come search on Kosmix instead of Google?”

Sigh of exasperation. What followed was a stream of convoluted explanations trying to convince my buddy that you’ll find more of what you want using our product. My annoyance had more to do with my understanding the difference, and not fatigue from engaging in an imaginary uphill battle to get people to search with Kosmix rather than Google. We’re more than happy to have users find us through Google, but we, as other similar companies find, will inevitably get compared against them as the standard rubric of success. Our employees even stand in line waiting for their very own Google brand T-shirt, as photographed in a recent “Time” article: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1641232,00.html

It is a simple issue of branding, brand name, brand recognition. Google is synonymous with search and may always be. Just as Coca-Cola is synonymous with refreshment, or Levi’s is synonymous with American style. Other companies can try to produce other colas, other jeans, or other search engines, but they will more than likely always come in second. Kosmix is not engaged in the battle to become synonymous with search, we’re in a relatively new field: becoming synonymous with the home page.

As our co-founder, Venky Harinarayan, notes in a recent Alt Search Engines article, “In today’s world, a consumer has to not only know what to look for, but also where to look for it – should she look for it on Google, or go to YouTube, or Flickr, or a blog search engine. What the consumer needs is a “home page” – a starting point – for her topic of interest, which brings the best of the Web into one place for her to explore.” (see the full article here: http://altsearchengines.com/2007/07/11/view-from-the-corner-office-kosmix/)

Other companies are still asking their users to search, to be active, to dig through those ten results to find some, not all, of what they may be looking for. Google Universal Search may resolve some of this, but fields of knowledge are funny beasts, and require unique habitats to truly thrive, something we do well at Kosmix by dividing the web into verticals. After understanding the autos, or health, or travel beast, we can then bring all the images, blogs, news, and unique content related to that vertical and query to a user,. We thereby create the best home page for any topic on the web, by not only defining our rich results by clarifying the sources, but what categories those sources belong. This means not only defining a web page as an Blog, but a Blog that is also a Republican pundit page. Every topic in the world doesn’t require search results, it requires a home page.

We ask our users not to be active, but be passive, sit back, relax, and let us bring the world home. We’ll redefine the home page, and become synonymous with that idea, not with search.

–Matthew Krajewski