$7.4 million in venture capital funding and a bet that they can finally crack the “meaning” of a webpage based on its content sees two Stanford graduates (same college as the Google boys) launching Kosmix, currently alpha, as a new search engine with a different approach to results. Kosmix, like Google and Yahoo, is crawling and indexing the entire Web. It has come up with its own technology to rank pages by category, instead of by keyword. It’s two founders, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan are both ex-Amazon (Director of Technology and General Manager respectively)
nstead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying — to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. If the linking page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can begin getting at its meaning, or at least muster up enough information to categorize it by topic. Harinarayan calls it “category rank.” Kosmix is essentially tagging pages with categories. “Auto-tagging the Web,” as Harinarayan puts it.
Certainly an interesting read of an article for your Friday evening browse of the web!
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