TechCrunch posted a story yesterday about Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com.com), a "search" company that has experienced significant traffic growth in March. According to their web site, "Kosmix is a guide to the Web. Kosmix offers you a new way to explore the Web—it's the place to start when you want to browse and discover everything the Web has to offer."
At Adhere, we are a big fan of the Kosmix user interface and think that it definitely one to emulate. The "dashboard" approach offers a great interface to a wide variety of different content / domains and falls in line with Google's vision of Universal Search. A vision that Google leaves to customers (or partners like us) to deliver for themselves.
I think that the rise in Twitter also is a reason for their spike in traffic. Kosmix has a nice Twitter interface for their query terms, and twitter has currently reached a fever pitch. Users are lusting for "real-time" news (as it is getting called), so integrating twitter results is a great way to satiate their demands.
We have been advocating Universal Search, to varying degrees of success, and we see this as yet more proof of what people want to see out of the search engine results pages (SERPs) whether they are on your web site or inside of your firewall.
The amazing thing is that it is not that hard to do. With the explosion of APIs, it is easy to create a universal search interface for your users. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. all have APIs to access information, and Google also has brought that ability inside the firewall with their One Boxes for the Google Search Appliance.
So, the path of offering a nice search experience is clear, whether you use or not, please take it! The world will be a better place! ;-)
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