It’s rare for a great new web service to come along that really makes you say “wow”, but Kosmix.com made me do just that. Recently, Robert Scoble tweeted about a video interview he did with the Kosmix creators. Give the video a watch, it explains the ins and outs of Kosmix and gives some great examples of how it can be used.

In a nutshell, Kosmix is a kind of search engine and web content aggregator. It differs from a common search engine such as Google and Yahoo in that it takes content from a wealth of different sources using their API’s and mashes them all together on a single web page, using relevant sources for the information it presents. Content can include regular web page searches, videos, images, audio, blog posts, and discussions from social media services, amongst other things. This is great for web searches that require more than just the facts, such as opinion articles, discussions and video blogs on certain topics. The home page also gives you the top stories, hot topics, and popular media for the day.

As an example of how it works, if you were to search for “Australian Internet filter”, Kosmix uses its complex algorithms to pull articles from Google, videos from YouTube, images from Yahoo and Flickr, news from MeeHive, as well as many other sources, then mashes them all together on one page. There are also sections for related information, or you can choose specific media types; for instance, only videos or only articles in the blogosphere.

Kosmix.com is still a brand new services (in ‘beta-ish’ status, which makes me grin), having launched in December of 2008 after receiving $20 million of funding from Time Warner. Its methods of monetisation include sponsor advertising and Google text ads.

Being so new, changes and improvements will be made to Kosmix over time. Co-Founder Anand Rajarman said the home page will probably be customisable in the future, which would be a great feature to have, and they’re currently working on UI changes and other features.

I’m hoping it becomes more internationally orientated, as right now it seems a little US-centric. It would be nice for it to understand that we live in Australia and would prefer more Australian based content. I  can easily see this happening in the future as more sources are added to the service. There’s a great deal of potential ahead of it, and I can’t wait to see how it evolves and improves as time goes by.

What do you think about Kosmix.com? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.