The beta version of a fairly substantial new competitor in the search realm, Kosmix, has recently expanded their vertical search categories to offer search in Video Games and Finance, in addition to the Health, Travel, and Politics verticals they’d launched back in February.

Tied to their Video Games vertical is a newly launched search engine, Gazerk. Besides the fact that the domain name demonstrates very clearly how the world seems to be running out of real word domains, this powered-by-Kosmix search engine should be appealing to the video game geek world. The color palette used by Gazerk is awful, by the way – pink text on a black background is definitely not a design with me in mind.

The US Politics vertical, which I hadn’t seen before, is quite useful – Kosmix’ categorization technology gives you the ability to organize the search results according to viewpoint – currently only Liberal, Conservative, or Libertarian, so it’s only a very general breakdown, but the idea may have potential.

Hat tip to Nadir at SEO Principle for noticing the new vertical search engines.