Kosmix goes Beta (-ish)
We’re excited to announce the launch of a beta, or beta-ish, version of our product today! At the same time, we’re also pleased to announce some additional funding. You should check out Anand’s post, which focuses on the funding and the vision, here. I’ll try to go into some more detail around the improvements in the product.
“What’s new?”, you may ask. Here are some of the most interesting features:
• New homepage: When you search for a topic, we organize the best of the web around the topic. So what should we do on the homepage, when you haven’t yet entered a topic? Well, we thought we’d organize the hottest items on the web across every topic. With the best of news, videos, images, and shopping all in one place, what better starting page could you ask for? For good measure, we also threw in the hottest topics we’re mining from our news and blog corpus. We hope that you will find this new homepage to be a great way to start their day.
• Improved Relevance: To provide a better experience around searching for topics, we now sort the different kinds of information we show you based on their relevance to the topic. For instance, you’ll see shopping right at the top for a query like http://www.kosmix.com/topic/ipod_nano, whereas a query like http://www.kosmix.com/topic/Sarah_Palin will have news and videos at the top. Similarly, queries around music will bring audio to the top, food and recipe queries will bring recipes to the forefront, stock tickers will bring up stock charts, travel destinations will show you maps near the top, and so on.
• Disambiguation: We have taken our first steps towards disambiguating between different intents for a query. For example, you can choose between Cobalt the element, the color and the car by clicking on the choices in the menu at the top: http://www.kosmix.com/topic/Cobalt. This feature is still in its infancy, and we hope to roll out significant improvements in the coming months. Similarly, searching for Tahoe lets you disambiguate between Lake Tahoe and Chevy Tahoe.
• “At a Glance” & “Topic Highlight”: To give you quick ways to digest a lot of information, we now summarize the topic in the all-new “at a glance” section. Also, whenever we can, we try to show you a “topic highlight”, which’s our best guess at the most relevant content for that topic. For example, check out the topic highlight on http://www.kosmix.com/topic/saturday_night_live
• More pathways to explore and browse: We’ve provided you easier ways to navigate to related topics. You can see this by looking at the “Related Material” section on the page http://www.kosmix.com/topic/Stonehenge – you’ll see useful content “from topic: Bath, Somerset”. We have also added a “preview” of the related topics that appear in the “Related in the Kosmos” section to make it easier for you to find related topics that are just right for you – just click on the magnifying glass logos next to any of the topics in the Kosmos and you’ll get a quick preview of what the related topic is about.
• Lots more content: We’re excited about having added hundreds of new content sources, and are thankful to many new partners who’ve given us access to their APIs, feeds or widgets. With this, you’ll start seeing a lot more niche sites on Kosmix searches for topics.
In addition to all these, we also make it easier for you to bookmark and share any topic you like. Simply click the bookmark/share link on the top/right of the page, and email the page to your friends or bookmark it on any of your favorite sites.
We’re hard people to please, and we realize this product still has a long way to go (hence the beta-ish label). Keep watching out for many more improvements to come soon and keep sending us your valuable feedback.
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December 9th, 2008 at 7:30 am
Love the site and technology. Looks very useful.
Can you do advanced searches e.g. I’m interested in all aspects of “coaching” other than “sports”. I’ve tried using “-sports” in the search field but this doesn’t seem to work.
Regards
Tony
December 9th, 2008 at 9:41 am
Hi, First of all congratulations for this fantastic thought process and I am very happy for your efforts in bringing out a different thinking in the web browsing. The points you have considered for the search are all very valid. Few observations that I made, which can be thought of improved are
a) The initial time taken for the user to make an entry into the search box is longer than google (I presume this is your benchmark as of now). I understand the web page is coming up with lot of graphics and large size videos. But if the search frame is made independent of this and becomes active the very moment someone gets into the kosmix.com, it will be welcomed.
b) the search results take a little while to populate the whole page, so the same improvement to allow clicking on any link prior to the full page getting loaded will allow the user to click on the link he spots and is looking for.
Hope this helps and I will surely be visiting this website and look forward to its growth.
Regards,
Vish
December 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Impressive guys dig in for the journey watch out for Google Police coming to close you down.
Tx
December 9th, 2008 at 10:20 pm
Hi,
Great effort.
It is rather a refreshing change to see a search result different from Googling.
But when I first entered kosmix.com in my IE6 address bar and hit the enter key,i guess it got a rude shock and went white faced for quite a while, then I had forcefully terminate it.
After a while it is fine now and I am enjoying this new experience.
Looking forward for more innovations from your side.
Krishna
December 9th, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Excellent!!! I love your homepage.
I suggest you to provide search box in the bottom area of the search result page.
All the best.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:02 am
Three huge problems…
1. Yes, it loads and populates really slow. The page layout is not as lean as Google’s.
2. There is no Geo Segmentation built in.
3. Need to work a lot on the page ranking. I know it is a function of time, a lot of time actually.
Unfortunately, I have still not bought into the USP of “exploring the web”.
December 10th, 2008 at 4:17 am
Hi
Congratulations on the launch of Kosmix, wishing you all the best.
I look forward to open an mail ID with Kosmix.
Regards
Maheswar Rao
December 10th, 2008 at 5:06 am
Hi guys
I am a doctor in India ..tried out your search engine today. I am glad to have found an alternative to google ..though truly speaking the search results overlap. the good part is the related in Kosmos. though that doesnt actually shorten my search times .. it just gives me some additional info.
i believe that what is required is some new algorithms maybe to look at things the way i want them to appear. Well early days yet .. hope you improve. all the best
December 10th, 2008 at 5:32 am
Guys,
Very impressive concept with a neat execution. My homepage has been Google for years – yesterday I discovered your site, was wowed, and changed it from Google to Kosmix. Best wishes for a successful future!
Christopher Usher.
December 10th, 2008 at 8:10 am
[...] funding, the site has opened up to the public for the first time in what’s charmingly called a ‘beta-ish’ launch. The home page gives you a clear indication of what to expect when you use it to search – [...]
December 10th, 2008 at 9:29 am
I read about you guys in some news links today and felt interested. Heard that once you offered Sergey & Larry to sell Google !!! That is GREAT… Anyway, I expected some different search results like Yahoo & Cuil. But you guys are offering mostly the Google result which is offered by many using customized Google search. A good example is http://www.cooqle.co.cc …….Would love to see how you differentiate yourself from Cooqle in terms of searching. Waiting to see the search market dominated by 2 Indian ….All the Best.
December 10th, 2008 at 10:52 am
Hi,
Great job.Days of hard work will make the site a success I’m sure.
regd sankha
December 10th, 2008 at 10:58 am
With the new homepage, Kosmix could be the place to go when people just want to know “what’s happening” without first choosing a lens through which to see the internet (entertainment, hard news, etc.).
I also like the disambiguation techniques you’re working on. Are you using proprietary tech, or open semantic ontologies?
Great work!
December 10th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Thanks for the comments! Tony, we don’t support advanced search yet, but will look to add some options in the future. The only similar support we offer today is when we explicitly have disambiguation suggestions at the top; e.g., you can look at different aspects of the query “mentor” here: http://www.kosmix.com/topic/mentor – you can pick between mythology, mentorship, the company or the city.
Vish, you should be able to enter keywords into the search box before the whole page loads. Can you tell us the browser/OS on which you noticed these issues?
December 10th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Hello,
Where do I find data on how to invest in your venture/funding.
Regards
Tito
December 11th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Hi,
Congrats!!!
great things, but need to do some work more. For search Google is there so why people will accept this. i got your concept but its lacking in some places.
i require one assistance , who will search everything for me
ex : i want to study in Australia in a good college can i get this.
please solve this
December 11th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
A lateral shift, a welcome change – awesome work – keep it up Kosmix team !!
Clearly does not seem to be an attempt to offer “yet another search-engine to compete with Google”; instead here is something that’s added an un-explored & creative dimension to exploring the web. So I envision Kosmix giving a healthy competition to Google, and both to co-exist as useful & powerful search-engines.
Looking forward to the go-live !
All the best !
Sachin
August 30th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Great blog you got here…keep up the good work.