Indians come up with Kosmix to challenge Google

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 Webpages searched instead of their popularity.

Google basically searches pages based on a sort of popularity contest and not necessarily its content, but Kosmix creators says 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 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 Webpages closely associated in meaning with the search term.

It then looks at what Webpages link to other pages to take a bigger stab at judging the pages subject.

If a Webpage says something similar to the page it links to, you can get enough information to categorise it by topic, says Harinarayan.

The company, set up last year, will officially launch at the DEMO conference for start-ups in Phoenix next week.

Kosmix has already started testing a health search on its Web site. 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.