Kosmix: The Political Search Engine
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in General Politics, TechnologyLike your current search engine, but think it’s too liberal? Possibly too conservative? Not libretarian enough?
Well, have I found something for you!
Apparently Kosmix figures out which results belong to a certain ideology and sorts them. Given the recent South Dakota decision, I tried the term abortion. Sure enough, the liberal results were largely pro-choice (I only found one that could be considered pro-life) and the conservative results were decidedly pro-life.
Though still in its alpha version, the politics engine is fairly adept at teasing out ideological orientations on the web. Typing in the word “tax,” for example, and then clicking the Conservative category brought up pages from a list of usual suspects that prefer lower taxes and less government regulation, such as GOP.gov, The Pacific Research Institute and Americans for Tax Reform. Likewise, results for a Liberal search on the word “gay” mostly yielded pages from gay-friendly organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way and Lambda.But some results defy logic. The Conservative search on “gay,” for instance, included 365Gay.com and a spoof article in The Onion titled “New Dad Thinks Baby Might Be Gay.” Johnson freely acknowledged that Kosmix is still error prone, but said the search engine is constantly learning.
I’m not sure how they’re doing this, but take a look at Kosmix politcal search engine and see for yourself.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 and is filed under General Politics, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
March 7th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Oh, lovely; more bubble-making for an already over-bubbled nation. Especially because there’s nothing inherently “liberal” or “conservative” about the current political split on homosexuality, abortion, or federal spending. I hope it dies before it breeds.
March 8th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Since ideological preference modeling is a central topic of my own research I have to wonder what their operational definitions are for their results.
March 8th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
You should email them and do a post on it.
March 8th, 2006 at 3:27 pm
I’m already on it. They haven’t replied yet, but the day is still young enough. ;-)
March 13th, 2006 at 7:14 am
Democracy Website Of The Week: Kosmix
Still in alpha form, Kosmix is a political search engine that categorizes results into conservative, liberal, and libertarian ideologies. Useful for searches where one wants to find articles from various sides. (hat tip: Donklephant)