$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!
Dumbfind is already doing this. come try it at http://www.dumbfind.com
didn’t find what i was looking for within the first ten search results, yet i can find it on google and yahoo. thanks for raising the point though, i’ll go through it over the weekend a little more. was unaware of it myself until now!
what were you looking for? our index isn’t yet the size of Google or Yahoo, but it is larger and more flexible than Kosmix!
Interesting. How do you plan (and how long) on developing your index? Are you looking to tackle the likes of Google or Yahoo in terms of search power in the future?
We are going to focus more on developing innovative new features and improving relevancy in the immediate future. Growing the index will happen gradually over time.
Good to hear theres a plan in place for its development anyway. Any insight as to the “innovative new features”? Relevancy has got to be key for me anyway!
send me an email, info at dumbfind.com, and you can have a peak at one of our upcoming features