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Kosmix, the search company that has built sites around specific topics like health and automobiles, just rolled out a “horizontal” search engine — namely, one that brings the Kosmix approach to any topic you can think of.

That may seem like a dangerous move; we’re pretty skeptical about any search company that tries to take on Google (particularly one whose founders considered acquiring and eventually declined to buy Google when they were working at Amazon in 1999). But Kosmix’s approach is less about ranking the results to every possible search query, and more about building a home page that pulls together the most relevant content for any subject. A search for “breast cancer,” for example, brings together basic facts from MayoClinic.com, video from Truveo, Google web search results and more.

The company says its strategy is paying off, with a total of around 15 million monthly unique visitors to its three existing sites, RightHealth, RightAutos and RightTrips. Now Kosmix is trying to make that work on a broader scale.

In a way, Mahalo has been trying to provide a similar service. But its search pages are built by people, while Kosmix creates its results automatically, with algorithms. In doing so, it can cover more topics — no one has bothered to build a Mahalo search page for VentureBeat, for example (which is a grave oversight, by the way), but there’s an automatically generated result in Kosmix. Even though VentureBeat doesn’t fall into one of Kosmix’s specialties, and Kosmix horizontal search is still in early, “alpha” testing mode, the page about us is surprisingly decent. Through Truveo, InfoSpace and other sites you can get all the photos and videos of Editor Matt Marshall that you can handle, plus our Google results and forum posts to Omgili.

[Update: Looks like someone at Mahalo was listening.]

A Kosmix spokesperson says the company will still maintain focused search sites like RightHealth, as well as building other “vertical” sites whose results can be used to enhance the horizontal search engine too.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has raised a total of $35 million.

Kosmix, the Silicon Valley search engine company that focuses on specific topics, such as health, has raised $10 million more in backing.

Kosmix is run by co-founders (including Venky Harinarayan, pictured left) who came close to buying Google in 1999 when they represented Amazon. Google was still a small company, but Google co-founder Sergey Brin responded to their offer saying he’d settle nothing short of single-digit billions; they passed. See our coverage of that history, here.

Needless to say, in retrospect that was a mistake. The Kosmix guys are filled with ambition in order redeem themselves, and they continue to plug away at Kosmix despite terrific odds. Scores of competing companies have launched to focus on every specialty topic under the sun.

Could their hard work be paying off? Kosmix’ health consumer site, www.righthealth.com, is now the sixth most visited health site, according on Hitwise. It draws more than 3.9 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, or a 56 percent increase since its official launch in fall. (See our coverage.) That comes despite a significant number of competitors in the health site and health search domain.

DAG Ventures led the investment. Previous investors Accel and Lightspeed also participated. Kosmix recently released a consumer auto site, www.rightautos.com, which attracts more than two million unique visitors a month, it said. It plans to release more topical search sites, including RightTrips.com, which is next.

The company previously raised $25 million.

Kosmix, the search engine company started by the guys who once almost bought Google when it was a year old, has unleashed a new health site, called RightHealth.

It organizes a large number of information sources into pages that are generally clear, concise, and easy to navigate, says David Hamilton, of VentureBeat LifeSciences, who reviews the site today. David concludes:

“RightHealth won’t find you a doctor, manage your medical bills or save you from the heartbreak of psoriasis, but it does a pretty decent job presenting often-complex medical information in a useful fashion. I may even start using it as a professional resource, which is more than I can say for any other health site I’ve ever looked at.”

See David’s full review here, where he compares with other sites like Healia and Healthline.

Health-information sites are popping up across the Web like mushrooms, but the sad fact is that most of them aren’t really very good. Search sites like Healia mostly seem to want to displace Google as a “first stop” for health-minded users — a relatively unlikely prospect. Places like Healthline that aim to offer a more comprehensive look at diseases, symptoms and treatments still generally present their information in a disjointed fashion, dividing it up among separate tabs and forcing users to click through different interfaces to find what they’re looking for.

One of the more ambitious efforts to straddle the tradeoff between breadth and depth is a new site from Kosmix called RightHealth. (It’s been in beta for a while, and Kosmix is now formally launching it.) At first, the concept sounds unpromising — Kosmix describes the site as a “home page” for health topics, in line with similar sites it’s also launching for auto and travel information. Once you get into it, however, it’s clear almost immediately that RightHealth does something unusual by integrating a large number of information sources into pages that are generally clear, concise, and easy to navigate. Best of all, the site is both comprehensive and deep, since it’s fairly straightforward to dive into complex subjects and to follow links to related subjects in an organic way without getting lost.

The RightHealth home page, a spare and unprepossessing layout dominated by a large ad, doesn’t really hint at the site’s power. Use the upper right-hand box to search for diseases, symptoms, the name of a drug, a surgical procedure or a general subject such as “weight loss,” however, and you’re off. Each search takes you to a tiled information page that generally offers a brief, well-written summary of the subject and links to related images and video, news, “trusted sources,” and advanced reading in the medical literature. One of the more significant features is an “explore” panel in the middle of the page that offers further links to related subjects that are intelligently assembled and organized.

Don’t take my word for it. Here’s a screenshot of the site’s diabetes page –

– which Kosmix co-founder Venky Harinarayan says is largely assembled on the fly. (This happens to be the page the company used in a demo of the site, but I’ve since poked around enough to feel confident that it’s representative and not a Potemkin setup.) The tabs along the top of the page offer further refinements of the subject, such as the “patient type” tab that lets you zero in on information related to diabetes in men, women or children.

The site, of course, isn’t perfect. The “advanced reading” tab, for instance, serves up a few articles and then general links to medical journals, pharma-sponsored sites and clinical guidelines, none of which are likely to be particularly helpful to your average user, and the community forums are a bit on the clunky side. (RightHealth also currently links to DailyStrength, so users have alternatives.) And the site’s sponsored Google links — currently its main source of revenue, although Harinarayan says Kosmix plans to supplement and perhaps eventually replace those with targeted advertising — aren’t always distinguished as such, which could easily cause users to blunder into ad sites.

RightHealth won’t find you a doctor, manage your medical bills or save you from the heartbreak of psoriasis, but it does a pretty decent job presenting often-complex medical information in a useful fashion. I may even start using it as a professional resource, which is more than I can say for any other health site I’ve ever looked at.

A brief aside: RightHealth can deliver some amusing results on occasion. For instance, when I searched on “stabbing pain” to see how the site would handle a slightly oddball request, the generated page came up with this:

Which is actually not bad, at least until you look under “Potential Risks” and see that the site decided to display “Knife Wound.” Causality is overrated anyway.