Indian Kosmix to take on Google

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Bangalore: Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan founded Kosmix, a California based search startup company, has raised $20 million in a new funding by Time Warner. The start-up, which specializes in sophisticated taxonomy whereby it can build pages on any topic searched, has gathered a total sum of $55 million through funding. The company has the traits of both Google and Mahalo yet maintains its won identity. Though it provides a detail search on the queries it doesn't provide any rankings. Infact, unlike Mahalo, Kosmix doesn't pay people to build those pages, instead uses algorithms to automatically generate them. Rajaraman said, "The key is that Kosmix uses a sophisticated taxonomy for classifying each query and determining which informational modules are most appropriate. For example, if I bring up the page for television show Gossip Girl, I get an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry, thumbnail images of YouTube videos, links to The New York Times Book Review (uh, what?) and more. In some cases, you can even get links to the Google and Mahalo results." The company is also ruminating over redesigning its site in beta site.