Internet search is heating up, and there is a new technology company that wants to change the current search landscape. Listen to Venky Harinarayan talk about his new search company Kosmix based in Mountain View, CA. Last month the company came out of its stealth mode and unveiled its new search engine product at Demo, an emerging technology conference.

Kosmix aims to categorize web content along new dimensions that Venky labels as auto-tagging. The way information is currently categorized and served to the end-user is an incomplete experience, and Kosmix hopes to change that with its new algorithm-based search technology. Finding relevant information on your finger tips is the mantra of the Kosmix team.

When you search for a term in Kosmix's search engine, you get a list of all the findings, along with a user-friendly categorization of the search term. For example, I searched on the term arthritis, and this is the information that I got on Kosmix. With one click, I got a comprehensive set of information that I could search along different dimensions and get a composite picture for my search term. Now, compare Kosmix's search results with that of Google for the same term, and here is the Google result.

Currently, Kosmix has three verticals available for end-users: Health (beta), Travel (alpha) and Politics (alpha).

Kosmix has raised $7.4 billion. Jeff Bezos of Amazon participated in the seed round of funding when they raised $700,000.

Venky and Anand Rajaram are the co-founders of Kosmix, and graduates of Stanford University from where they got their PhD's. They are also partners at Cambrian Ventures, a VC company located in Mountain View. Venky and Anand were part of the original team of Junglee that was acquired by Amazon. At the time of its acquisition Ram Shriram was heading Junglee.

Venky was very successful during the Web 1.0 phenomenon, and is now actively involved in the unfolding of the Web 2.0 trend with his new search engine company.

More about the Interviewee
After completing his Masters at UCLA, Venky worked at Tandem Computers for a couple of years, and decided to go to Stanford to do his PhD. Around about this time, the dotcom boom was a hot trend in the valley, and Venky became involved in a start-up called Junglee that was eventually acquired by Amazon. One of the first clients of Junglee was the Wall Street Journal, and Junglee's technology powered the paper's online classified edition.


Cool Google Stuff
Silicon Beat Article on Kosmix

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