I haven’t been giving Kosmix the greatest reviews in the past because I did not see them as being very innovative when it came to search.  Clearly I may be alone in my opinion because Kosmix’s traffic is surging.  As a matter of fact, in the month of March Kosmix’s traffic surged 419%.  The website received 3.2 million unique visitors in March.  TechCrunch compares Kosmix to Mahalo.

Kosmix basically aggregates news items, popular videos, and breaking news from external sources.  This is all put together by various algorithms rather than using human editors like Mahalo.  Around December 2008, Kosmix raised $20 million.  Thus far the company has about $55 million in funding.  The $20 million round was led by Time Warner.

As much as I like to see innovative startups succeed, I don’t quite see the game-changing abilities of Kosmix.  This is why it surprised me that they were able to raise $20 million in recent funding.  In total funding they have raised $55 million.  When a company raises that sort of money, you have to ask yourself, what does your product actually do?

Kosmix does metasearches and aggregates content from a bunch of other sources.  Top stories are pulled from Yahoo! Buzz, Digg, CNN, and Fark.  Popular videos are pulled from Hulu, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr.  Trending topics are from Twitter.  Lucky Dip is from People magazine.  Daily deals are pulled from DealNews, Amazon.com, and Orbitz.  And finally Images of the Day are pulled from Kodak, Flickr, and Picasa.

In my opinion, it appears that Kosmix is to search is what Alltop is to RSS feeds.  And the difference is that Guy Kawasaki spent $10,000 to create Alltop. I’m not the only one that questions Kosmix’s technology.  VentureBeat has a similar opinion.

But the numbers don’t like when it comes to VC dollars.  Kosmix had over 11 million monthly visitors recently.  Kosmix will also be rolling out an advertising strategy next year some time as well as a customizable homepage.

The investors in the $20 million round of funding includes Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures.  Former Motorola CEO/Chairman Ed Zander was also an investor.

Recently, Kosmix launched www.righthealth.com, a health consumer website that providers visitors content an opportunity to search through various medical content.  Currently, RightHealth Beta is receiving 2.5 million visits and 9 million searches per month.  The interface is very clean and the web site is essentially a consolidator of information.

When users plug keywords into the search the following items appear: contextual videos powered by Truveo, a description from Wikipedia, related questions that appear on Yahoo! Answers, and news from the web.  The first problem I see is that this site doesn’t really show any indication of focusing on strictly medical content.  Why do I say this?

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Kosmix^[1] and RevolutionHealth^[2] just announced today that they will be partnering in allowing users to categorize and quickly pull information about medical conditions and treatments. Kosmix’s core competency is categorization search (i.e. tag search-similar to Quintura). RevolutionHealth will be able to utilize Kosmix’s search to place relevant medical content together.

RevolutionHealth was founded by Steve Case, former CEO and chairman of America Online. Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. Venky also founded Cambrian Ventures and worked as a GM at Amazon.com.

“RevolutionHealth.com is pioneering a new and better way to bring more health choices closer to consumers,” stated Kosmix co-founder, Anand Rajaraman. “The combination of Kosmix and RevolutionHealth.com is a first step in changing the health care industry as we know it today, transforming it into an entity that will make a profound difference in our lives and the way we manage our health.”

RevolutionHealth integrates content and Web 2.0 tools such as social networking. The company also offers Premium Services that enable users to prepare for doctor visits. For example, when inputting symptoms that one may have, RevolutionHealth will suggest questions to ask one’s doctor. RevolutionHealth also has medical-related videos such as a description of Lasik surgery procedures.

“The search box on RevolutionHealth.com allows people to find the information that is most useful and relevant to them–wherever it might come from,” stated Matt Koll, a senior vice president of RevolutionHealth. “Whether it is information from the trusted medical sources assembled on our site, such as MayoClinic.com and Harvard Health, from people who have similar experiences to share or from the array of sources on the Internet, Kosmix provides impressive breadth of coverage with precise sorting of results.”

According to Harinarayan, the reason why Revolution Health partnered with Kosmix over others is because:
“RevolutionHealth was looking for a technology engine that could provide the best search results in depth and breadth to give their users the best heath content out there.  In Kosmix, they have a partner that can scale to all of the content on the Web and deliver the most relevant results for their users.  The reason we can do this is that we are the first engine to deliver all of our content results through algorithms with no human intervention at all  — the first ‘algo-produced content engine.’  This gives users all of the results they need – particularly in the long tail – and the best user experience for the Web, making the ability to search for any content that is health-related simple, intuitive and graphical.”

[1] Kosmix.com
[2] RevolutionHealth.com
[3] Kosmix Blog: Jon Miller joins Kosmix board