Worst move for vertical search ever…

Kosmix has traditionally been a vertical search for health, autos and travel.  They have made great improvements to the UI of search results and built a solid audience (the companies claims of 15mm UVs has been highly refuted as compete shows 50-100,000 UVs; although that may not count about 1mm UVs for their auto verticals).  I generally liked what Kosmix was doing in vertical search (they have a similar approach to what we are doing for the sports vertical).  TechCrunch is reporting that they are now moving to a general search engine.  Why???  They are now competing head-to-head with Google with no clear advantage or differentiation.  Worse yet, they couldn’t possible provide better search results for general searches.