Here's how to use Kosmix, a 'guide to the web'. Users can surf the web by topics, and Kosmix will present a magazine-style topic page organizing the most relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Navigate through the tabs to see various tools Kosmix has to offer.
My Thoughts on Kosmix
I am a big fan of Kosmix. So many times I have wanted to know more about something, but didn't know where to look. I would try Google, and then Wikipedia to get a brief background on the topic, but my search stopped there. With Kosmix, I not only can browse random interesting topics to my heart's content, if there's a particular topic I want to know more about, a colorful, well-organized collection of news, reactions, images, videos, and guides is available after just a single Kosmix search. As you can see in my Home Page and Search demonstrations, Kosmix provides the user with more information than they ever knew existed. As the site describes itself:
The way we see it, there are two different ways to navigate the Web: Search and Browse. Search lets you find specific information or navigate to sites you already know. Use Kosmix when you want to see what else is out there. (Kosmix)
That pretty much sums it up. Explore + Browse = Kosmix!
Recommendations for Using Kosmix
Kosmix is different that general search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Watch the following video clip created by Kosmix to see how the search engine differs, and what it can be used for:
To get the most out of Kosmix:
- Spend time with the site to get to know everything it offers.
- Browse. The Feeling Browsy? section on Kosmix is reason enough to visit the site. There's so much you can learn and discover.
- If you're looking for a very specific detail about a topic, Kosmix might not be the best place to start.
- If you're just starting out researching a broad topic, Kosmix is the best place to start.
- Use the tabs. If you only scan the stuff in the first tab of the News section, for instance, than you're only going to see a quarter of the news available.
- Make it your homepage for awhile so you can used to all the features and see what changes every day.
On the Kosmix home page, there are several awesome features. I will discuss each feature circled in red on the screenshot below, but feel free to explore the site further to see all the cool things it has to offer.
Top News
Like other search engines we've used, Kosmix highlights some of the most recent and popular news stories in its Top News section. The neat thing is that it pulls those stories from other sites. By clicking on the icon at the top of the section, you can toggle between top news from Yahoo Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Newsweek, depending on what you're in the mood for.
Hot Topic Tweets
Today it's "Health Care Reform Tweets". Tomorrow, who knows? The Hot Topic Tweets section on Kosmix is updated in real time with tweets about a particular topic. This is just one of the ways that Kosmix embraces other types of media content. Users who use Kosmix daily can see what the most important news topics are, and what people are saying about them.
Popular Entertainment
This section might be my favorite. The Popular Entertainment section on Kosmix shows the most popular (duh!) videos or audio bits on the web. Just like the Top News section, it allows the user to toggle through various media sources to see what their most popular items are. Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Rhapsody all feature their top entertainment for Kosmix. The clips don't necessarily have anything to do with news or current events. For instance one of the top clips on Hulu was a Daily Show with Jon Stewart clip.
Hot Search Trends
In this section, Kosmix lists the 10 hottest search trends on Google. Unfortunately, there's no ability to toggle in this section and compare with other general search engines. Now, as a little experiment I wanted to see how Kosmix's "hot search trends" from Google (on right) compared to Google's actual hot search trends (on left), according to their trends feature. Here are the screenshots of both (taken basically simultaneously).
As you can see, they're not the same. In fact, the two features share only two common search terms. So there must be a time delay on the Kosmix site for the hot search trends to be updated.
Just for Laughs
I was lying, THIS is my favorite section. Who doesn't want to see hilarious stuff when they're surfing the web? The Just for Laughs section on Kosmix contains "news" from Fark, The Onion, MeeHive Odd News, and Snopes. Again, you can toggle through the various sources and see what they have to offer. There was only one problem with it. Now, I've never even heard of MeeHive Odd News before, but the odd news it featured under Just for Laughs wasn't at all odd…or funny. See for yourself:
I thought MAYBE MeeHive was like The Onion and just had really bad titles and opening lines, but the link I clicked on, "Explosions and weapons fire erupt in central Kabul", took me to the CNN World site. I guess that part of it is odd. But it was still my favorite feature because The Onion, Fark, and Snopes stories just make me smile.
Daily Deals
The Daily Deals section of Kosmix features good deals from online retailers Woot, Dealnews, Amazon, and SmarterTravel. As you can see in the image above, Dealnews was featuring a Lands End t-shirt and a surge protector, woo hoo! Woot is a very cool online retailer that always has very good deals on electronics and tech-geek stuff. This section, along with the Hot Search Trends, Popular Entertainment, and Just for Laughs sections make me believe that Kosmix is really targeting the younger crowd. They integrate social media and topics young people care about most, and they're not a boring "general search" site that's a one-click shop for tech-stunted adults
Images of the Day
This section is pretty self-explanatory. Kosmix pulls some awesome photos (not sure how) from the Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa web sites. Every day, one image is added to the stream from each of those sites, so viewers can see the images from the past 7-10 days. The Image of the Day section is just a really cool and refreshing thing to have on a search site. While it might not serve as much function as Hot Search Trends or Top News, for the photography lovers out there it can introduce you to people on Flickr or Picasa whose work you enjoy.
Feeling Browsy
This section lists out all the categories on Kosmix, as it is a topic search engine. Now, I know I'm getting away from the home page here, but below you can see what comes up when you click on one of the categories in the Feeling Browsy? section. Each category is organized to include all the related topic pages on the site within the category. The category page lists sub-categories first (Folklore, Language, Religion, etc.), followed by a navigable A-Z listing of all the topic pages relating to Society and Culture.
This element, the category and topic organization of Kosmix, is what makes it so useful. After navigating through topics (Food and Agriculture category > Food sub-category > Fast Food), I get an amazing collection of news, media, and information about fast food. This is a great tool for any research project, or for anyone that needs the most relevant information on a topic organized into a user friendly format. I will explore this more in my search analysis, but for now, play around and see for yourself!
Here's how I used Kosmix to help me with my project on the fast food industry. There are additional features other than the ones I have listed here, depending on the type of search you do. I encourage you to search a variety of topics to find everything Kosmix offers!
Not surprising, I started by typing in 'fast food industry' in the search bar. Kosmix takes a minute to populate a user-friendly page tailored to my search requests. Another way I could have gotten to this page is by digging down through Kosmix's categories, as a I described in my analysis of the home page. The Fast Food Industry page on Kosmix has seven major sections: Overview, Conversations, Reviews & Guides, News & Blogs, Shopping, Media, and Web Search.
Now I will dig a little deeper and explore some of the tools useful in a few of these sections.
Overview
The Overview section provides a basic description of the search topic (using Wikipedia!) in the At a Glance sub-section, and then summarizes the highlights from all other sections on the site. I won't talk in-depth about the content in the Overview section, since it's just the most recent stuff being pulled from the other sections, but I do want to talk about the overall usefulness factor of Kosmix. This site is easy to use, visually appealing, has great content from various forms of media, and did I mention it's easy to use? The page is well organized, and each sub-section has the same layout, making it easier for users to find what they're looking for. The sub-sections start with the title (i.e. Reviews & Guides), then lists the source that the content for that sub-section was pulled from (i.e. Google Base), and then has a sampling of the content from that section, followed by a link to get more content from the source. This uniform layout for each sub-section really makes it easy to find what you want and explore the site.
Conversations
The Conversation section of this Kosmix page summarizes what people are saying about the fast food industry. Here's a sampling of content, pulled from Omgili Forum Search. What's Omgili Forum Search you ask? It's a specialized search engine that focuses on "many to many" user generated content forums like forums, discussion groups, mailing lists, answer boards, and more. Omgili then helps you find "subjective information". "As opposed to traditional search engines, which search for sites and pages, Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions," (Omgili)
The links of each content piece returned from Omgili take you directly to the source.
Also in the Conversations section are questions and answers from Yahoo Answers related to the fast food industry, and search results from Backtype, a conversational search engine that indexes conversations from millions of blogs, social networks, and other social media.
Overall, the Conversations section on Kosmix is really interesting and would be a great place to go to see what the masses are saying about a topic of interest. However, I did think there was one thing missing…where are all the tweets? Kosmix clearly knows the importance of micro-blogging since it has Hot Topic Tweets on the home page, but it doesn't include tweets about specific topics on their pages? It would definitely add value to the site.
News & Blogs
The News & Blogs section of the Kosmix Fast Food Industry page is pretty much what you would expect; it pulls news or blog-generated content about the fast food industry from various sources such as Google Blog Search, OneRiot, and MeeHive News Search.
In terms of the content of the News & Blogs section, I wasn't super impressed with actual news. I would have liked to see Kosmix pull news information from a site that specialized in business news, such as WSJ or even Silobreaker. I think this page would be useful for someone who is leisurely searching a particular topic or industry for surface-level updates. It is NOT for the academic researcher who wants detailed information and the most important developments for a topic.
Media
The last section I want to dive into is the Media section on Kosmix's Fast Food Industry page. This section has two main forms of content: images and videos. The images come from sources like Google, Yahoo, Flickr. Video content is included from eClipta, Videosurf, Truveo, YouTube, and Blinkx. Here's an example of something you can find in the Media section for the Fast Food Industry, the new trailer for the film Fast Food Nation:
I think the Media section is one of the most useful tools Kosmix offers on its topic pages. It's a one stop shop for all video and images related to the topic, and pulls its content from eight different sources. For someone researching a topic, and wanting to add visual content to a report, Kosmix Media is a great place to go.
So how does Kosmix work? What advantages does it have? Using the framework in the image below, I will deconstruct Kosmix's search experience.
1. The Search Engine
Quality of the Experience
As a search engine, Kosmix is extremely successful. However, management probably wouldn't be too satisfied with the classification of Kosmix as a "search engine".
Venky Harinarayan, co-founder of Kosmix said, "Search does what it does well, very well. I don't think we can ever compete with that." Kosmix isn't about searching through relevant documents for a particular subject. Its goal is to "tell you more about something." (New York Times)
Kosmix is better described as a categorization engine. Nonetheless, the quality of the user experience is incredible, and does have the potential to rival the market-dominating Google. Instead of spitting out the standard 10 most relevant sites/documents upon search, Kosmix creates an aesthetically-appealing dashboard highlighting the most important news, videos, photos, commentary, communities, and links associated with the topic.
Responsiveness
When a user initiates a search on Kosmix, it takes less than 10 seconds for the site to create a useful dashboard. It's definitely not immediate, or as quick as Google, but it's understandable when you know that the site has to dig deep into all internet content, pull out what's relevant, organize it within tabs, make it pretty, and then finally deliver it to the user. One thing Kosmix is not useful for (yet) is real-time content, but its co-founder says they're going in that direction. You might remember in my home page demo that the Hop Topic Trends on Kosmix, pulled from Google, didn't match up with the current hot trends on Google. Kosmix is not the search engine to use to see the latest tweet or blog on a topic - there is a time delay before that content will be incorporated in the site.
2. Query
Variety and Usefulness of Special Queries
I really tried to stump Kosmix. Maybe I'm just not good at thinking of obscure topics but for everything I tried, Kosmix created a dashboard for me with relevant, useful content. They even had a dashboard (albeit with some unrelated content) on my favorite blogger, Pioneer Woman - who I like to believe is pretty obscure and I'm her biggest fan. Whatever search topic or category you throw at Kosmix, it comes back with more information that you could have asked for or known existed.
Additionally, as I mentioned before, the content returned by Kosmix completely depends on the type of query. When I searched for San Francisco, CA, there were sections on Attractions, Hotels, and Things To Do, while my search for Ford Mustangs had additional sections on Car Reviews and Auto Forums.
Automation
Unfortunately, Kosmix does not have any options for content to be sent automatically to users. While users could use other tools to monitor changes or updates on Kosmix dashboards, there isn't even an option to get RSS feeds from the site for news, blogs, commentary, etc.
3. Results
Content
The content of Kosmix is organized into user-friendly dashboards that appear as if a human had found everything you wanted to know about a topic and organized it in a magazine-style encyclopedia entry on the internet. After scouring the internet, Kosmix has built up content for "nearly 5 million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese," (New York Times) Those dashboards can include many different types of content: the usual news, blogs, tweets, commentary, reviews & guides, videos, images, and communities - but also recipes, airline deals, hotel reviews, shopping, book clubs, attractions and more. Of course, just like most other search engines, Kosmix makes its money on advertising. However, advertising on dashboards is generally limited to a few sponsored links toward the bottom of the page that don't interfere with the content of the page.
Format of Results
Kosmix results are delivered in HTML format in colorful, well-organized, magazine-style pages. Instead of just listing the name, link, and micro-description of the content as many search engines do, Kosmix often shows content pulled directly from the source. For example, the At a Glance section on my search for "tree frog" pulls the introductory description on Wikipedia, instead of just offering a link to it and a one-liner description.
Delivery Form
Since Kosmix doesn't automatically send any content to users through media forms, the only delivery form available is through the HTML dashboards on the site.
4. Searchable Information
Frequency of Updates
The content on Kosmix is updated at various degrees of frequency. For example, the top two pieces of content on the Conversations section on the Fort Hood category dashboard, which unfortunately is a top news story right now, were from December 2008 and July 2009. Clearly, there MUST have been some conversations going on on the internet about Fort Hood over the past week, but they haven't been identified as content yet by Kosmix. The news, photos, videos, and other sections did reflect the current events in the category, but the particular Conversations section didn't. Alternatively, the News & Blog and Tweet sections of Shaquille O'Neal's Kosmix dashboard were updated within minutes of his wife filing for legal separation.
5. Subset of Web
Target Content
Here's an excerpt from the New York Times article explaining how Kosmix works:
By scouring the Web, the company has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese. The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet.
The proprietary algorithm that Kosmix uses to populate its dashboards is a computer algorithm, unlike some sites that use human editors to do so. As this Tech Crunch article states, the computer algorithm makes the engine very flexible but also has some loopholes that allow irrelevant content to be included on a category page.
Quality of Coverage
The quality of coverage is generally great for Kosmix category dashboards. With the exception of breaking news and relatively unknown or obscure topics, Kosmix almost always has more relevant and useful information about a topic than the user would know existed. However with obscure topics, or topics with ambigous names, the Kosmix algorithm can return irrelevant results. For example, my search for Pioneer Woman (the blogger) also came up with images of actual women of the pioneering days. Its understandable WHY this was included, it just wasn't what I was looking for and that is a danger with Kosmix's results on some topics.
Opacity
The results of Kosmix are relatively transparent, since all content returned on dashboards is organized by the source it came from. The source is named and the user is also provided a link to visit the source directly. In this way, Kosmix pretty much serves as a collection of a lot of really great sites. But it brings together all the necessary information on a topic and presents it in a useful way - better than many of the sources could, making it a great place to go for topical research.
Other Sources Consulted for this Analysis
I chose to compare Kosmix to Google, the king of search engines (at least in my book). Some have said that Kosmix is one of Google's biggest future rivals. However, I will point out that Kosmix's founders don't want to be compared to Google, because they're trying to make a search engine that's different than Google. Kosmix is in fact a meta-search engine that returns results from multiple sites simultaneously and separately. Nevertheless, here's what I think the key differences between Kosmix and Google are, from a searcher's perspective:
Customization
When it comes to customization, Google is better than Kosmix. I've been using Kosmix for weeks now and I haven't actually found a single way you can customize the site. With Google, if the user is logged in they can customize pretty much everything from their homepage to their Google News categories and layout. Additionally, Google provides a lot of add-ons that make it worthwhile for the user to spend time on the site. For instance, I'm guilty of being one of those people who has an iGoogle homepage, is an avid user of my Google Calendar and Reader, and because of that, generally start my searches on Google. While I would like to use Kosmix more and think it's a great site, at this point it doesn't offer the customized utility that Google does.
Depth
Kosmix definitely allows the user to dive deeper into their query and find out more about it, more so than Google. Google gives its users very little room to dig deeper into a subject, only suggesting a couple related searches at the bottom of each query results page. Kosmix has a "Related in the Kosmos" section that introduces the user to other categories on Kosmix, followed by a listing of specific queries in each category that give the user more direction. In addition, the fact that Kosmix introduces the user to such a variety of content on its dashboards is reason enough that it gives the user a deeper search experience. I can learn so much more about {the battle of the bulge}, for instance, from Kosmix's dashboard than I can from the top 10 blue links on Google.
Browse Factor
Kosmix also allows users to browse topics and learn more about something they may have never heard of. Google doesn't have a feature to do that. While Google News, Blogs Search, and Trends can introduce a user to new information, Google's general search function has no ability to do so. Kosmix is truly set up for browsing. Its home page introduces the user to tons of content that they weren't looking for: top news stories, popular entertainment, funny stuff, hot search trends, shopping deals, cool images, popular Kosmix categories, and of course, the Feeling Browsy? section. This allows users to navigate through the categorical system that Kosmix has set up, and who knows what category you could end up on!
Delivery
Google does offer better delivery options than Kosmix. Kosmix only delivers its content through its HTML dashboards. RSS feeds aren't available (unless you go through a third-party site) and there are no email alerts. Google, however, really is set up to be delivered any way the user wants it: HTML page, customized email alert, RSS feed, and as a section on the iGoogle home page.
Conclusion
Like I said in the Overview, I'm a big fan of Kosmix. It's not perfect, and it is different than the typical search engine I'm used to (Google). Kosmix really serves a different purpose than Google, which is cause for many of the differences it has. However, Kosmix could be improved with additional delivery and customization options, like the ones Google has. I don't think Kosmix should try to emulate Google, but it could learn from some of the features that make Google so appealing to repeat users - the fact that its a personalized and customized home on the web for so many people.
