If you've heard of the recent Obama-Dobson verbal duels, and if you're someone like me who doesn't know a lot about James Dobson but curious to know more, where would you start your search? Or if you're planning to hike the Continental Divide Trail (of which, I hiked a small part that goes through the Rocky Mountain National Park last year), and want to know what people are saying about the trail, what's a good place to start? Search engines are great for finding good links when you have a specific intent in mind, but not when your intent is much broader or even indefinite. Portals and content sites do a great job of organizing information on topics, but they don't come anywhere close to giving you a sense for all the information that's on the web.
At Kosmix we launched a new product last week where you can search for topics, and view the entire web organized in one place. For James Dobson, you'll find a biography, links to recent quotes by Dobson, reviews of his books, blogs and forum posts, Q&A, and a lot more. You'll also find links to related topics like Focus on the Family, Religious Right and names of other Evangelicals like Ted Haggard. But if you were to search for another topic like Aaliyah, you'll see that the contents of the page are fairly different and very customized for a music artist.
How do we do this? Our categorization technology that uses our index of the web is able to understand the various intents and related categories associated with any given topic. With this knowledge, we assemble content from various relevant sources using APIs, RSS feeds, licensed content and widgets, and lay it out in a way that makes it easy to navigate this richness of information.
A few things about this product that truly differentiate us from attempts by others at creating topic pages are -
- Breadth: There is no other resource on the web that can produce topic overviews for topics that do not confirm to any white-list: e.g., the topic Charles Lindbergh Kidnapping, or Profumo Scandal may be expressed in so many different ways, and our approach does a good job with such queries/topics that are not expressed in a canonical way.
- Customization: Another differentiator is the ability to lay out the page contextually: e.g., Seinfeld, Akon, and Breast Cancer all pick content from very different sources and arrange it based on relevance.
- Somewhat loosely related but still very relevant information: We are also able to present the user with a lot more information for topics that are somewhat related to their query. E.g., search for Tony Parker, and you'll see news about Spurs on the bottom right rail.
Easy jumping off points: Check out the Related in the Kosmos section to find related topics that you might want to explore - Taxonomy of information: If you'd like to explore more with "reviews and opinions" or more specifically in "blogs", you can refine your results by clicking on the links in the top navigational bar.
- True to the Source: We present information in a way that's true to the source, i.e., everything is not a link and a snippet like traditional search, but can be rendered as a widget, a map, a person's profile, a ticket, a listing or whatever else makes sense.
Those of you who have known Kosmix would know that we've so far focused on creating topic pages for health, autos and travel, which are distributed on our sites Righthealth, Rightautos, and Righttrips. Together, these sites have become leaders in their respective categories, with Righthealth consistently featuring among the top 5 sites in health. We hope to migrate these sites to the new platform you find on Kosmix.com soon - i.e., very soon a search for Meningitis on Righthealth would look similar to what we have on Kosmix.com today.
Having said all that, I must also repeat that the product is still an Alpha, and we're looking to put in a few months of work to make it shine. In the meanwhile, I'd love to get your feedback on how we can improve this product and make it really useful for you. Anand, one of our co-founders, raises some more product and positioning related questions for your inputs on his blog Datawocky.
Hey Vijay,
Congrats on the launch. My two cents:
Good:
1. Amazon link is a good touch.
2. Video queries seem very relevant
3. Side panel (right) works well.
Bad:
1. Yahoo 'question and answers' seems to bring in rather funky results. Out of character with the rest of the content.
Glitches:
1. Some insets not rendering properly - saw this for Wikipedia ('dosa recipe') and Google ('susheela ramen') results.
2. Text in top bar is getting chopped (see under media for 'discover')
Suggestions:
1. Add top search results from popular blogs like Reddit, digg, BoingBoing, StumbleUpon, Engadget etc
2. Introduce a timeline to order results.
3. Crosslink the same topic across different modules.
Posted by: vijar | June 30, 2008 at 12:48 PM