Mountain View, California-based Kosmix may share its headquarters in the same city as Google, however the search  engine start-up has no aspirations for toppling the search Goliath, at least not directly, even after it announced on Monday that it had acquired $20 million in funding from investors led by Time Warner, the world's biggest media company and owner of AOL. The financing, which came during an economic downturn when venture capitalists have been reluctant to back even the most promising Silicon Valley start-ups, brought to $55 million the amount Kosmix has raised during the past three years as it looks to achieve success as an alternative to traditional search engines. A "Big Vote Of Confidence" For Employer Of 65 On Monday Kosmix also announced the latest test incarnation of its Web site, where visitors can use the portal-style homepage to perform searches tailored to topics of a broader nature than Google, that return information shown on pages that have pulled in and aggregated content from various Web properties including text, image slide shows, message board posts and video. The Kosmix site sometimes includes traditional search results from Google and advertised links from the leading search engine firm's AdWords program, a pairing not entirely out of place, as the two firms have convergent origins. Three-year-old Kosmix, which employs 65 people not far from Google's headquarters, was founded by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, Indian-born businessmen who both attended Stanford University, the same school that famously saw Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page drop out of its PhD programs. Announcing the new funding he described as "fantastic" and a "big vote of confidence" for Kosmix, Rajaraman said Time Warner had been joined by existing investors Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Lightspeed, and also said that former Motorola chief executive Ed Zander had joined Kosmix as an advisor and investor. At Motorola Zander was responsible for bringing the popular Razr cell phone to market. Building On RightHealth Proof-of-Concept Earlier funding rounds at the search engine start-up, which Rajaraman said draws 11 million visits each month, have also attracted well-known backers including Jeff Bezos, the co-founder of Amazon and financial supporter of social networking giant Facebook. Rajaraman and Harinarayan first found success with a Web business in 1996 when  they helped build a comparison shopping Web site called Junglee, a company that was purchased two years later by Amazon for stock compensation worth $280 million. "We have a proven revenue model with significant revenues and robust growth," Rajaraman wrote Monday in a message announcing the funding round posted on the Kosmix blog, making reference to online health Web site RightHealth, which launched in 2007 and has grown to become the second most-visited such site on the Web according to Web traffic analysis firm Hitwise. RightHealth, which Rajaraman has called a proof-of-concept for Kosmix, has used the underlying technology powering the new search site to help more than double its annual user traffic, according to Web metrics company comScore. Kosmix Search Engine Raises $20 Million From Time Warner, Others After three years improving the programming algorithms that drive Kosmix, Rajaraman and Harinarayan see a search engine the differs substantially from most of the leading search engine firm's offerings. "We consider ourselves an explore engine," Rajaraman said recently, and noted that although comparisons have been made between what Kosmix offers and companies using so-called semantic search techniques, his company hopes to "deliver on the promise of semantic search without doing it that way." Mahalo, a so-called human-powered search engine, launched in test form in June 2007 by Jason Calacanis, and Google's Knol both pay people to write pages on a wide variety of subjects, an approach Kosmix doesn't follow for its aggregating search results pages. The Kosmix search engine test announced Monday at www.kosmix.com is an expansion of the first public test the company released over the summer, and according to Rajaraman the site has added "more information sources (many thousands), huge improvements in our relevance algorithms, a much-improved user interface, and a completely new homepage" that includes "hot news, topics, videos, slide shows, and gossip of the moment," Rajaraman noted in the announcement. Kosmix said that it planned to use the new funding to help build partnerships with other Web properties, expand its site and add a sales team. Rajaraman said the company, which has used relevant advertising on its site to generate revenue, hoped to bring back some of the "pleasure of aimless browsing" that was more prevalent in the first years on the Web's existence. Using a simple algorithm-like sentence Rajaraman described the difference between Kosmix and Google on Monday. "Google = Search + Find. Kosmix = Explore + Browse," he wrote. Related Links :
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