Kosmix

» see kosmix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

by 2005 my search box was google and nothing else. kosmix launched that same year trying to be a different shape of search, and i never had a reason to look. it was built by venky harinarayan and anand rajaraman, the pair who had made junglee, the shopping search engine amazon bought in 1998. they knew the category cold. they still could not out-google google.

so kosmix kept changing what it was. it began as general web search, gave that up, became a vertical search engine for narrow topics, and eventually turned into something stranger: pages that auto-assembled everything the web knew about a subject, half search result and half encyclopedia entry. it was a real attempt at organizing the web by topic instead of by query. it just never found the traffic to matter.

walmart bought kosmix in april 2011 for a reported 300 million dollars, not for the search product but for the team. the founders and their engineers became @walmartlabs, the retailer's social and mobile skunkworks. the kosmix name went dark almost immediately, and the founders themselves left in 2012. the technology that survived went to work helping people buy things, which is where search money always was.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually building ~

the topic-page idea aged better than the company did. kosmix wanted a single destination for any subject, machine-built from across the web, before wikipedia fully owned that job and long before an ai would just write you the paragraph. it was early to a real need. being early to a real need is how most of these graves get dug.

~ where the value went ~

the honest read is that kosmix stopped being a product and became a hiring event. walmart did not want a search engine, it wanted the people who could build one, and it paid startup-acquisition money to get them into an org chart. the founders cashed out and walked within a year. the technology got pointed at shopping carts. nothing about that reached a user in turkey, or almost anywhere, as kosmix. it reached them as walmart's backend.

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