A little over a week ago, TechCrunch featured an article on the latest round of funding raise by rising star in web search, Kosmix. In said latest round, Kosmix managed to rake in an impressive $20 million from a wide range of investors, led by Time Warner, bringing the search engine’s total funding to $55 million. Upon paying a visit to their site, it becomes immediately apparent what all the hoopla’s about. Kosmix pulls the top search results from a variety of popular sources in a variety of different categories, including video sites YouTube and Truveo, info sites like Wikipedia and HowStuffWorks, and shopping sites like Amazon and Ebay, in order to create a mash-up of all the possible kinds of information you might be interested in. A collection of related subjects are also presented in the left margin of the results page, in order to facilitate some degree of search refinement. Without a doubt, Kosmix provides a search experience quite distinct from the major search engines, and I feel fairly safe in saying that most searches performed with Ask would yield more fulfilling results with Kosmix. And yet, after playing with Kosmix for a while, I felt as though something was amiss.