Two Indian computer wizards, who studied along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University, are now launching a start-up to compete with the world's best known search engine.
Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan are betting that 'Kosmix', with its deep search technology, can challenge Google by gleaning more about the overall content of web pages searched instead of their popularity.
Google basically searches pages based on a sort of popularity contest and not necessarily its content, but creators of Kosmix say that they took a different approach and developed a new kind of 'categorisation' technology.
The two Indians, who were among the co-founders of web database company 'Junglee', hope that their deep search technology can improve upon Google's one-size-fits-all approach.
Kosmix asks users to define a category for a search. If a search term is related to health, users can make a query in a health-related search box. That way, it can find web pages closely associated in meaning with the search term.
It then looks at what web pages linking to other pages say, to take a bigger stab at judging the page's subject.
If a web page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can get enough information to categorise it by topic, says Harinarayan.
{{/usCountry}}If a web page is saying something similar to the page it links to, you can get enough information to categorise it by topic, says Harinarayan.
{{/usCountry}}The company, set up last year, will officially launch at the DEMO conference for start-ups in Phoenix next week.