My Review for Kosmix "Search Engine": Rivalling Google?

This could be a cool new site: Kosmix. I heard of it from here, my favorite online newspaper, the International Herald Tribune (no, unfortunately they did not pay me...:() I thought I'd give it a try. After all, any buzzy new website that claims to go against Google Search is worth a try, don't you think?

My opinions are mixed. Kosmix looks cool, but for now it's kind of a 'work in progress'. Beta-ish is an overstatement. For goodness sake, when I tried to add my blog to their search engine it popped up a Microsoft Outlook window. Oh boy.

There are two parts to Kosmix, as I could gather: 1. on the home page, it basically tries to add up all the major 'news' sites: I mean, in the internet definition of the news ("whatever buzzes"). In other words, Twitter is high up there, so is Digg, YouTube, Flickr and Google Search (can't forget them!). You can move boxes of content around, but apparently you can't add any other than what they give you (I will keep looking for that). Thus, they pretty much 'assume' what you might be interested in. But if I like to read ZDNET news rather than Yahoo News, tough. And if you like Delicious not Digg, well, that's tough too. There's also no 'sign up', so you can't get personalized recommendations. In today's internet environment, that's a big oops. I'm sure they're working on it.

Now for the Search: I decided to do two rather different searches. One: Dell Adamo (since I just wrote about it). I get a rather unbalanced page with stuff on one side and almost nothing on the other. A big plus: Blogs show up (nothing like that on the front page). Bad news: there's no News section. The main box comes from Meehive News (what the hell is that?). Google search is second, but I don't care too much about that. Second search, something more complex: "Facilities Management". Things are better: I get first a Wikipedia entry; then a YouTube, Yahoo Answers, News & Blogs. Bad news: Google is minimalized on the right hand side, which is disproportionately longer than the central side.

Conclusions: I'm sure Kosmix will improve from its mega-beta state. The whole idea of grouping all sort of social media applications together is by itself a very nice thing to do. However, there's much to be done. It seems obvious to me that they have to balance the box contents and allow customization. I will keep checking it out. Perhaps it will get better. For now, Google is still my first search choice.