Indians come up with Kosmix to challenge Google

By agencies   |   Monday, 06 February 2006, 20:30 IST
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SILICON VALLY: Two Indian computer wizards who studied along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University are now launching a start-up, Kosmix, to compete with the world’s best-known search engine Google. The Duo, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, are betting that Kosmix with its deep search technology can challenge Google by gleaning more about the overall content of Web pages searched instead of their popularity. Google, which searches pages, based on popularity counts and not necessarily its content. The creators of Kosmix say they took a different approach and developed a new kind of categorization technology. Both of them, who were among the co-founders of web database company Junglee, hope their deep search technology can improve upon Google’s one-size-fits-all approach. Kosmix asks users to define a category for a search. If a search term is related to health, users can make a query in a health-related search box. That way, it can find Web pages closely associated in meaning with the search term. It then looks at what Web pages link to other pages—to take a bigger stab at judging the pages subject. Harinarayan said, “If a Web page says something similar to the page it links to, you can get enough information to categorize it by topic.” The company came into existence last year, will officially launch at the DEMO conference for start-ups in Phoenix next week. Kosmix has already started testing a health search on its Web site. Over the next year, the company will release numerous categories of search—from health to travel, politics and finance. It plans to unveil a general search box within a year.