Now for a healthier search

BANGALORE: They missed buying Google twice. Now, Junglee co-founders Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan have founded a startup with dreams of matching the search giant. They have developed a new search engine, www.kosmix.com, which goes live on Monday.

The site claims to throw up better results on health topics. It searches the Internet to provide not only a link to sites for the related word but also divides it into various categories.

Kosmix works differently from Google, whose co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, went to Stanford University with Rajaraman and Harinarayan.

Google may work well when you are looking for a specific answer. But what if there is no one right answer? This is where Kosmix wants to help you.

For example, while a search on diabetes on Google gives links to expert websites, Kosmix answers in categories from defining diabetes in basic terms to expert comments and blogs, among others.

“They are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic, of a web page,” siliconbeat.com, a site that tracks technology trends, said. Kosmix raised $7.5 million from venture funds.

“What you can get with five minutes at this site is a hundred times what you can get at Google,” Harinarayan said.