Kosmix - Tagging the web

Some interesting things in search today... Joel Cheesman spotted a new look that Google has been testing out:

Personally, I like it. It looks cleaner to me, and I don't mind the navigation on the left. Another thing to note, with the increase in real estate on the left, as opposed to the current placement above the search box, Google will be able to integrate more vertical search options, such as jobs, much easier. (see Joel's post)

But, something else new and cool has been spotted by Matt Marshall called Kosmix -- which is a new search engine that tries to organize results by category -- from Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee (Junglee was acquired by Amazon and, according to the post, they knew Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Stanford and actually tried to acquire Google a couple of times):

To organize its results, Kosmix doesn't use pagerank -- or popularity, based on the number links to a page. Kosmix decided pagerank is inefficient when it comes to categories. "There is no affinity to topic, when you are ranking by raw popularity," says Harinarayan.

Instead, 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.

Kosmix has started with a health search, but will soon roll out travel and politics search, and will follow with a rolling thunder of scores of other types of searches, Harinarayan says. (see full post)

Sounds like they might be able to do some interesting things in the jobs space...

I just did a couple of searches on Kosmix and it is pretty cool.