More DEMO: Kosmix's Category-Specific Search

A company called Cosmix just demonstrated its new search engine, Kosmix. (Note: The previous sentence contains no typos.)

Kosmix does specialized search in three categories: health, travel, and politics. It attempts to sort results into categories--here, for example, is how it broke down results for a search for "back pain":



Lots of other search engines have tried to do this type of sorting before, and the results have usually felt kind of random. I just did a few searches, and Kosmix's results in its health engine (which is in beta) looked pretty useful; the travel and politics ones (in alpha) were rough. (Cute trick: The politics engine breaks everything down into conservative, liberal, and libertarian categories.)

Of course, one question with new approaches to search is, are the results actually any better than typing a few relevant keywords into Google? It'd be revealing to try that test with Kosmix, especially once it's out of beta...