Is Kosmix The True ‘Google Beater’?
By Anna Johnson on March 18th, 2009The New York Times must have known their article about Kosmix titled, ‘Just Don’t Compare Kosmix To Google’ would have tongues wagging and brains stretching. Is Kosmix the game changer that will unseat Google from its position as virtually framing the Internet experience?
I was going to write ‘unseat Google from its search engine dominance’ but Kosmix is NOT a search engine. And that’s really the point.
Google will likely continue as the dominant search engine for some time to come. But will search engines continue to dominate our experience of the Internet – or at least the world wide web?
The New York Times suggests Kosmix may be just the thing to change how we acquire information on the Internet.
If you visit the Kosmix site and type in, say, ‘internet marketing’ in the search field, up comes a selection of information from a variety of sources (including Google).
There’s a selection of information from ‘At a Glance’, ‘News and Blogs’, ‘Videos’, ‘Tweets’, ‘Conversations’ and more.
Now, if all this sounds familiar… it is. There are other services that aggregate information from a variety of sources onto a web page. I think we’ve covered a few in Kikabink News, the most recent being Surchur.
The New York Times says Kosmix differs from the other services due to its specialized technology.
Apparently Kosmix has built an enormous taxonomy – a set of nearly five million categories on all kinds of topics – which is calculated to yield, you guessed it, more relevant, information.
So, just as Google has used better technology to unseat its search engine rivals, Kosmix hopes to do the same.
Whether Kosmix (or anyone else) will replace Google as the search mode of choice (whilst using information from Google at the same time) remains to be seen.
I think it’s worth being open minded, though, because if people really do migrate to a new mode of using the Internet it will certainly impact Internet marketing.
It may, for example, reduce the importance of ‘search engine optimization’ whilst boosting the importance of ‘Internet media optimization’ (or whatever term becomes accepted)…
Source: Miguel Helft, “Just Don’t Compare Kosmix to Google,” The New York Times, March 14, 2009
