Kosmix acquires Cruxlux

Search engine looking to enhance results by adding how and why topics are related to each other

Kosmix, a search engine which organizes results into magazine-style topic pages, announced an exciting acquisition on Tuesday of Cruxlux, a small Web startup focused on telling users how two topics are related to one another.  The terms of the deal were not exactly disclosed, other than it was a mix of cash and stock.

What can users of Kosmix expect to see with the addition of Cruxlux' technologies?  Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix told us users should see a significant improvement in its overall technology.  On the fundamental technology level, Kosmix will add Cruxlux's technology into its own categorization algorithm.  On a user interface level, the Related in the Kosmos' module will improve to actually explain relationships between any two given topics.  Rajaraman told us we should expect to see these features in the next six months or so.  

Founded back in early 2007, Cruxlux was built on the idea that everything is connected to each other in one way or another.  Guha Jayachandran, co-founder of Cruxlux told us, "These are things we are able to bring out that we think can be applied in a variety of really useful and interesting ways."  

Although Cruxlux remains in private beta, we were able to see and try out a few examples.  One example shown was 'How do Appollo 11 and MTV relate?'  Cruxlux showed the USS Hornet recovered astronauts from Apollo 11 back in July of 1969.  The Hornet was said to be a haunted warship.  MTV eventually caught on to this in 2000 and filmed an episode of Fear on the ship...thus Cruxlux connected the relationship between what seems to be two very disparate topics.  Cruxlux has also integrated with Facebook Connect to see relationships across the social graph.  It's actually quite entertaining and useful to some extent.

As for Kosmix, the founders told me everything is going extremely well.  The site saw over 10 million unique visitors in the month of September.  It's still running an ad-based business model, Rajaraman shared, "We are seeing hugely significant amounts of revenue on our site.  Ads work the same as they work on Google's site, people are typing in very specific topics and those ads are very targeted to those topics.  We get very high rates of engagement with the ads, just like Google gets.  Per-pageview, our ad rates are very very high."

This being Kosmix' first acquisition, the company said it was in a great financial position to grow aggressively.  It's looking to hire, and seeking more acquisitions.  Rajaraman shared, "We are out there looking for really great small teams building technology in spaces related to Kosmix.  We want to bring them on board."  

Kosmix has received $55 million in total funding from investors including Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Ventures and Ed Zander.

Cruxlux in action, see below.