I’ve been playing around with Kosmix.com this morning to do some research for work. Of course I know Factiva is the ultimate online research tool for knowledge workers like myself (that is probably as far as anyone from Dow Jones will read, so I’ll be objective from now on). However, I wanted to try an actual project with Kosmix to put it through its paces.

My overall impression of the site is pretty favorable. I like the layout of the site, and the natural grouping of different content types. I especially like the inclusion of social media, and even found some of the most useful information, or links to it in that section of the search results (social intelligence anyone?).  The site did an ok job at clustering and establishing some basic relationships for some, but not all of my searches (this seemed to happen when my query was very specific, so I imagine there was not enough volume of results to do so). I was disappointed by the lack of any extraction capabilities (identifying companies, or products, or people for example) and visualizations.

Kosmix did a fair job of helping guide me through my research, I didn’t have to run more searches to navigate to related information. Though I did not try Right Health, a vertical search portal built on the Kosmix platform, I can see where the platform would be well suited for that.

However navigation and understanding is where I think all of our interfaces for research can improve, and certainly Kosmix has a fair way to go here. I mentioned the lack of entity extraction earlier, and that is really a pre-requisite for the ability to do this well. For example I was researching a particular category of software tools, and while company names appeared in many of the results and categories, they were never identified as a company, and linked to any relevant company information (fundamentals, business events, etc) and this caused more searching and extra time on my part to get these details.

Finally while the site was visually pleasing, there were no visualizations that really helped me understand the information. Again this is an area where many of our research tools can improve, and an area I think we have the technology and resource to invest in but I’m just not seeing a great deal of it.

Ok, now back to Factiva to finish my research (in case someone from DJ did actually read this far..).

- Ken