Stravinsky's Sizzlin' Shack

Kosmix which is an up and coming search engine focused on niche markets, is an interesting player to keep watching because they keep releasing nifty search verticals based on some reliable algorithms. They started out with Travel, U.S Politics & Health and quite recently they've silently expanded last month to include Video Games and Finance. The smart kookies behind Kosmix are Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaram who are graduates (PhD gaga!) of Stanford University and they're the same guys who were considering on buying Google when it first appeared in the late 90's. If you're interested in getting to know the juice behind Kosmix and it's freshness, you should definintely listen to Kamla Bhatt's podcast show with Venky done a few months ago and get to know Kosmix straight from the horse's mouth!

According to a blog posting at Silicon Beat, the dazzling folks at Kosmix have raised $7.4 million (USD) in funding thanks to Accel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, increasing the total amount of funding for Kosmix to $25.7 million, nearing the same mark by Google way back then. It's also interesting to note that Accel have pumped $11.5 million into Kayak who's seems a likely Kosmix competitor and the best travel search engine according to Mark Johnson who's a product manager at Kosmix. But despite all the glitz and glamour, Kosmix still haven't launched the new plugins at their labs for the new verticals, Video Games and Finance. So I've taken the opportunity to do a bit of tweaking this morning and have come up with unoffical plugins for the new verticals over here. And as this press release rightly states, Kosmix is now powering Gazerk which is the new game site launched by the Ziff Davis Media Game Group.