Will Kosmix be the nemesis of Google?

Boasting of the same PhD heritage as Sergey and Larry of Google, these 2 Indian guys Anand Rajarama and Venky Harinarayan aim to best their former Stanford classmates at search.

Now, Kosmix has raised $7.4 million in venture capital as these folks embark on the next Holy Grial of search -- the "aboutness"/ meaning/ context of your keyword searches. Google's pagerank currently organizes search results by the gross popularity of links to a particular webpage, Kosmix attempts to do a deeper level of this by attempting to decipher the "meaning" of a page by analyzing those very links that leads to a webpage in order to understand the context of that page better.Anand and Venky, according to this article at SiliconBeat, used to own Junglee, the first Internet company founded out of their Stanford department and hence supposedly role models for other folks, including Sergey and Larry. It is noteworthy that Junglee also boasts Ram Shriram, the early investor and director of Google from Sherpalo Ventures.

Its admirable that more are challenging the status quo of Google's domination over the search industry. Competition is needed especially as Google is looking invincible, however, there doesn;t appear to be too much revenue model innovation at Kosmix yet. I would be interested to know if there is any disruption in this business model which Google is overly reliant on. With the first decade of the Internet industry looing to its conclusion, we have seen Google taking over the mantle of search leadership from Yahoo and drawing attention from the Microsoft empire along with a slew of bandwagon jumpers.. Kosmix and the rest of the Google-killer-wannabes has history on their side in the seemingly cyclical nature of the internet industry. I believe that with the increasing democratization of the internet witnessed through user-created content and the Web 2.0 hype, whoever manages to sift through all these cyber-junk to deliver valuable content will win.