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Explore Internet the Kosmix way

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CIOL Bureau
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Silicon Valley start-up Kosmix announced on Monday that it has raised $20 million in new financing from Time Warner and Ed Zander, the former boss of Motorola to power the growth of the company.

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Kosmix (www.kosmix.com), which is being presented as a guide to the Web, lets users explore the Web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics.

Silicon Valley analysts are of the opinion that Kosmix has the potential to take on the might of Google, though the founders say it is totally different from any conventional search engines.

The site is the brainchild of Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan and they made the capital to venture into Kosmix by selling their e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon for $250m.

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The company already has the backer of Facebook and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos among its investors. “Even more than the amount of financing, I’m especially proud that the lead investor in this round is Time Warner, the world’s largest media company,” said Anand Rajaraman in his blog.

“Our existing investors Lightspeed, Accel, and DAG participated in the round as well. The Kosmix team also is greatly strengthened by the addition of Ed Zander as investor and strategic advisor.”

In these perilous economic times, the funding is a big vote of confidence in Kosmix’s product and business, he added.

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Rajaraman was a contemporary of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin at Stanford University. Started in 2005, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan took almost three years to fine tune Kosmix, which breaks the concept of any conventional search engines.

It gives the results in a wider perspective – a combination of audios, videos and texts. Suppose you search ‘Mumbai’ the result will give you the history of Mumbai, its map, important places, events apart from news.

"It's not just text, it's not just facts, it's more like exploring than finding," says Rajaraman. "You're not searching, you're browsing." Google and Yahoo are search engines; Kosmix is an explore engine according to him.

Apart from Kosmix, the group also owns RightHealth, which is said to be the #2 health web site in the US and another site, Meehive, is in the pipeline.

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