A Silicon Valley start-up that is taking on the might of Google has attracted investment from Time Warner, owner of AOL, and the man who launched one of the world's most popular mobile phones.
Kosmix, which already counts the backer of Facebook and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos among its investors, has secured $20m (£13.5m) from Time Warner and Ed Zander, the former boss of Motorola.
Zander was at the helm of the American mobile phone maker when it launched the Razr, the ultra-slim model that went on to become one of the world's best sellers. He is joining the company as an adviser.
Kosmix is the brainchild of Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan, who made their fortunes in the dotcom boom selling their e-commerce company Junglee to Amazon for $250m. Rajaraman was a contemporary of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin at Stanford University.
The duo have spent the last three years perfecting Kosmix's technology and the site - kosmix.com - will relaunch today. They claim Kosmix takes online search a step further than just generating a list of websites containing certain words.
The site looks more like a web portal than a search engine. It pulls together text, audio and video content based on the underlying concept behind any query entered, rather than just looking for sites that contain the words in that query.
"If you want a specific piece of information you use search and Google is your best bet," Rajaraman said. "But sometimes we are not looking for such a specific piece of information but something broader ... sometimes it is far more valuable to get the opinion and discussion and commentary around things.
"It's not just text, it's not just facts, it's more like exploring than finding," he said. "You're not searching, you're browsing."
So a search for "chocolate cake", for instance, brings up a wikipedia entry about cake, plus recipes, pictures and videos of people making cakes and details of stores and online shops offering cakes and ingredients. It also has a list of related topics from chocolate brownies and devil's food cake through to tiramisu. It also shows results generated by Google.
Kosmix hopes to make money by dropping adverts into the pages that are generated, basing these adverts around the topic requested. The page also includes traditional sponsored links that are generated by Google AdWords.
Kosmix - which employs 65 people just round the corner from Google in Mountain View, California - has already demonstrated the advertising potential of its system by creating RightHealth. It is an online medical resource that uses Kosmix's concept-based search algorithms and has gone from nowhere to the second largest US health site in the space of a year, attracting 11 million visitors a month.
The company has raised $35m from Bezos, the serial dotcom investor Bill Miller and venture capital firms Accel Partners, which backed Facebook, Lightspeed Ventures Partners, and Dag Ventures.
Rajaraman said the cash from Time Warner "gives us enough runway to grow the company for the foreseeable future" and should get it to profitability.
