Two Indian computer wizards who studied along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, are 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 webpages searched instead of their popularity.Google searches pages based on their popularity and not necessarily their content but Kosmix’ creators said they took a different approach and developed a new kind of ’categorisation’ technology.The two, among the co-founders of web database company ‘Junglee’, hope their 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. Hence, it can find webpages closely associated with the search term. It then looks at what webpages linking to other pages say, thus judging the page’s subject better.The company, set up last year, will launch at the demo conference for start-ups in Phoenix next week.Kosmix has already started testing a health search on its website. Over the next year, the company will release numerous categories of search—from health to travel, politics and finance. It plans to unveil a general search box within a year.
