There’s a brand new search engine making plans to compete with Google. Kosmix, a start up by Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan (who studied at Stanford University along with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin) aims to create an alternate search technology which can compete with Google’s system.

The premise of their search engine is what they call "deep search technology" – defining the precise subject of a web page by examining the content and the content of links pointing to it. Google’s system is largely based on popularity – assuming that the most popular sites are the most relevant. The Kosmix system will examine the content in depth to apply each site to categories, which the search results can be isolated by.

It’s a clever idea, but time will tell how well it will work. I can see some problems with some very entertaining and unique websites which are practically impossible to categorize, and other complications – however, it may well be a highly effective system to avoid the easy propagation of SPAM sites.

Their site is currently in Alpha development, and indexes health related information.
It’s certainly worth a look – perhaps we’ll soon have a new competitor in the search engine industry!