Kosmix

Had a chance to speak with Venky Harinaraya and Michelle Sangster from Kosmix this past week. Very cool stuff. While Web 2.0 principles have been readily adopted by start-up companies, larger companies (especially traditional online content providers) have been a bit slower on the draw. Traditional online content providers limit themselves and their users to search their own 'owned' data on their sites. Internet users end up going to Google as a default to find more relevant content with a broader basis than what they find via the 'owned' content alone. (That's a 'duh' moment) Unfortunately (as mentioned below in reference to Google Base) Google's methodology for organizing said content isn't always optimized for a particular category of interest. Vertically-focused search engines have been popping up in response, but haven't caught a lot of fire since they're trying to build activity from the ground up.

Kosmix is tackling this issue straight-on by partnering with high-value/highly-trafficked online content/service providers, leveraging the context of their sites, and tailoring a web-wide but category-specific search experience for their users more directly related to the interests (based on an index of 3 billion web docs and growing). Think about this. This puts a site at risk of giving traffic to other content providers BUT drives increased traffic and usage due to the greater relevancy and utility of a particular category-specific search on said site. It's a great counter to having potentially loyal users HAVE to go to Google/Yahoo/MSN to find what they're looking for. In addition, Kosmix can integrate user-specific data to their service and present dynamic contextual search results per the user. I've been harping on the personal web thing for a bit now where relevant content finds you vs you trying to find/organize your content online. Kosmix enables online content/service providers the ability to integrate into this movement. Very cool.

Kosmix has started in the Health category and signed up Ziff-Davis, Healthcentral, Quality Health, Healthia and others. They just extended their categories to Politics and Travel as well. This is a great foil to having search dominated by the few...