I’m speaking with these guys next week. For now, you can read about them here….(SiliconBeat)
Meet Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, two of the co-founders at Junglee, and who twice seriously considered acquiring Google in its early days, but decided their friend Brin was too bold, if not arrogant, to deal with.
Now they plan to officially launch an ambitious search engine company, Kosmix at the Demo conference to begin the week of Feb 6 in Phoenix. They’ve also raised $7.4 million in venture capital.
They are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic of a Web page.
Uh, figuring out the meaning of _every_ web page? Why not just figure out the answer to _the_ meaning and get it over with? It’s a single question!
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What exactly about Brin was “too bold” and “arrogant”,
if he is in fact their “friend”, he must not have been that hard to “deal with”.
Perhaps it was a cultural misunderstanding; The Internet brings together different cultures that years ago, would have never met.
Suddenly, many different sub-culture Norms and Traditions are working intimitely and learning together.
Brin and Page were said to have argued – intellectually – often in the early stages of their relationship.
Looking forward to the interviews and your take on Kosmix. 7.4 million doesn’t seem like much vs big G’s capitalization of approx 2000 times that, but Google started with peanuts and now practically owns the search market.
Of course when Google started in search, there were huge problems with the current engines and Google was able to exploit that clear need and bring back far superior results. Certainly, vertical search engines can grab specific niches (until Google buys the best ones that is), but it is hard for me to see a general purpose search taking a large bite out of Google’s market.
Here’s to hoping their new venture does as well as their other search investment – Efficient Frontier.
I tried a few searches on http://www.kosmix.com – pretty impressed. Google has done a lot of great things but in recent times I feel they are losing their focus. It is refreshing to see a new entity coming up with ideas of doing things differently, and probably, much better.
Wishing all success to Kosmix!
Anything that refines search and provides more accurate results is welcome.
Having said this, I feel research is more personalized and thoug people use search engines to locate new sites and information, those who are into serious research bookmark them.
That is why I developed LookupThis.com. Being a net researcher myself, I found it difficult to keep track of my favorite links, organize them and search it.
So when I want to find something on the web, I can first check if its in my bookmarks list and then search the web.
This is what LookupThis.com does and I believe it works well for the 25 users who are presently using this FREE service.
A Bonus to using LookupThis.com is that it provides a unique AD Space Sharing Feature that permits users to host their affiliate links. The ADs then get displayed free of cost on LookupThis Search Result Pages.
Check it out yourself