Updated March 30 2008

Kosmix is a different kind of clustering search engine. Their spider crawls the web and works hard to categorize the web pages it gathers into algorithm generated topic pages.

Their ambition is that every topic should have a “home page” — a page that serves as a doorway to all the most valuable information on the subject at hand.

At present Kosmix limits its activity to three sub portals of sort: Health, travel and autos. You can browse these sub portals ad if they were directories or search for info on everything from Alfa Romeo to athlete’s foot. Read on to see what I think of the results.

I haven’t done a full test. I went searching for info on Venice and got this page (remember to pick the right category from the drop-down menu). Kosmix provides images, videos and encyclopedia info, which is handy, kind of like what Ask does when you search for geographic info.

In addition, there’s a column with the heading Explore. Here you get selected articles in categories matching the subject of your search. I got categories like Destinations (Venice Italy, Venice Florida, Venice Louisiana), Monuments & History (Doges’ Palace, St Mark’s Square, Venice And Its Lagoon) and Art & Culture (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Teatro La Fenice Venice, Venice Film Festival).

But the information isn’t properly focused: Kosmix mixes info from its health portal into my page, which ought to be all about travel. My verdict is: It’s a good idea that needs some work to be great. At the moment I prefer Mahalo for portal pages like the ones Kosmix is attempting.

Finding good travel info online isn’t easy. The search results of Google, Yahoo and Live are all riddled with spam. So far, the best place to go for spam free info on hotels, sights and more has been Mahalo, a human powered search engine edited by payed editors and volunteers. My favorite for computer generated results used to be Ask (here’s an Ask search on Venice).

After taking Kosmix for a spin, my initial impression is that their results rival those of Mahalo. I’ll be doing some more tests and I plan to talk to the people at Kosmix to find out how they achieve these very decent results.