Brand new niche search engine Kosmix found itself in the news recently for producing a political search engine that delivers results separated by their conservative, liberal, and Libertarian leanings. But there's more to the company than politics. This article takes a look at how Kosmix just might save even power searchers a lot of time and deliver a wider range of relevant results.
Using the Internet has been compared to trying to do research in a library where all the books are scattered throughout the building in various random places rather than arranged neatly in order on the shelves. With than analogy, Google and the major search engines become the “card catalogues,” which these days are on a computer even in the smallest and most antiquated of public libraries. But the analogy is far from perfect, as there are corners of the library that the major search engines don’t reach as well as they might. What do you do then?
Well, if you’re an experienced researcher, you start consulting specialized indexes of resources. Depending on what you’re looking for, these range from the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature through specialized encyclopedias (such as the Encyclopedia of Associations) through online resources for particular fields, such as law and medicine. To take the library analogy back to the Internet and search engines, this is where specialized search engines come in.
This brings me to the topic of this article. One of these days I’d like to do a “roundup” piece that covers a variety of these businesses that have sprung up in the cracks that Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have left for others. Today, though, I’m going to review just one: Kosmix. This company was in the news recently for creating a political search engine that allows users to see their results organized by conservative, liberal, or Libertarian leanings. But that’s actually only one of three search engines offered by Kosmix; the other two focus on travel and health.
So what kind of results can you expect from a search engine that specializes in particular areas? Are they more helpful than you can find just from putting the same query into Google? Being the research hound that I am, both by inclination and occupational necessity, I had to take a look.
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