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What’s navigational search you ask? It’s a search approach where you are not searching for a specific answer but more looking for good materials that relates to a particular topic. The search results is a start of a navigational experience where it leads you on a guided navigational experience that allow you to drill down to the relevant concept or topic area that you are interested in. Or in the words of the founders of Kosmas, the goal of its search engine is to “tell their users more about something,”
A good example is when you are researching about a particular travel destination. This is the case where you are not looking for a particular answer but are just looking for general material ABOUT a particular destination. You are looking for someone to help and guide you through the most important topics or concepts related to your travel destination.
In order to have a navigational search experience, someone needs to act as a guide, and that’s where Kosmas comes in.
Kosmas has been mentioned by the New York Times as a potential Google killer and have often been described as a semantic search engine, I like to think the unique search results it presents lends itself also to a navigational search approach.
The search experience on Kosmas is hard to explain other than describing it as sort of like a metadata search engine except it actually knows what you are asking about and customise the content sources it searches and present it to you in a useful manner in a magazine like layout.
For a start, it clusters your search query results and present you with related topics that you can drill into. But it then go on and provides you with a wealth of material that are somehow RIGHT for the search you are conducting. For my search of “iPhone case” above, it presented me with a number of related topics such as iPod and iPod Touch, it then presented me with images of iPhone cases, links to shops where I can buy them, and tweets of people talking about iPhone cases.
The interesting thing is, if you search for something different, the types of contents presented may be completely different. For example, if I search for “Sydney”. I am presented with the Wikipedia entry for Sydney and a map of Sydney!
Kosmas claims that the results for any search can contain information from over 15 sources and may include images, videos, reviews, and conversation. The neat thing is that the search engine works out what you are searching for semantically and searches through the best contents sources that relates to your search string.
It is remarkably accurate and comprehensive when you are searching for basic concepts such as an object or location, but when the number of keywords starts to go north of 3, the results becomes less useful, the argument would be that you really should be searching for basic concepts that you like to explore more and less narrow topic areas using Kosmas.
One thing is for sure, if you are planning a trip, or doing research on a new product, Kosmas is definitely a good place to start, and I will definitely be using it in the future.
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