A Million Little Pixels

Flowers is sitting in a chair at the Kozoru office. A small hoop hangs from his left earlobe. His beard is full today, but his facial hair goes through frequent revisions. A bottle of Fiji water, his brand of choice, is within reach. His mien is calm and friendly, like that of a patient teacher.

Flowers reminisces about his days of studying English literature and philosophy in college. He was attracted to the liberal arts, he says, because he didn't want to be near the nerds in computer labs. "I'm socially awkward, but they were way more awkward than I was," he says.

A man of diverse interests (he edits video and writes novels and film scripts in his spare time), Flowers built Kozoru in his image. Eleven people work at the company, which leases space in a bland office park near Metcalf and Shawnee Mission Parkway in Overland Park. Most members of the Kozoru team are in their thirties and strike a hip pose. Flowers met the communications manager, Justin Gardner, through the Kansas City Screenwriters club. Network Administrator Chris Downs plays in a death-metal band and wrote and directed a horror film, Shunned.

Downs left Kozoru earlier this year to work at Kansas City design agency VML. Downs says he thought that quitting a start-up would allow him more time to work on his outside projects. He immediately regretted the decision and returned after three and a half weeks.

"We're happy you're back," Flowers tells Downs, who is headed outdoors for a smoke break. "You don't want to work there anyway. Bureaucracy."

"First day I was there, this is what happened," Downs says. "I walked in and sat down at my desk, and I went, 'Holy shit, what have I done?'"

The Kozoru work schedule is flexible but demanding. Flowers asks his crew to be present or available via video chat from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. An approaching deadline typically means late nights and seven-day workweeks. "I'm pretty tough," Flowers says of his management style. Early spring felt like final-exam week for Flowers and his staff. Last month, Kozoru invited a group of industry types to use a trial of the new cell-phone and instant-messaging search engine.

Originally, Flowers talked about Kozoru taking on search giants such as Google. The plan was to build a search engine that responded to questions with authoritative answers. In Flowers' example, the question "Who is Gordon Downie?" would return a pithy reply describing Downie as the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, a Canadian rock band. Kozoru sought to deliver needles where so many keyword searches produce haystacks.

Search technology has always frustrated Flowers. He says he can remember being 9 years old and asking his Tandy TRS-80, "Why is the sky blue?" The computer simply beeped at him.

Flowers says he began talking with friends in the late '90s about how cool it would be to build a better search engine. If he was going to improve search, Flowers decided that he needed to use mathematics. Math, after all, is something that computers do very well.

"Our approach is to take a mathematical or statistical approach to language," he explains. "You don't care what the words are. You don't care what the words mean. You just map them to numbers and then figure out how close they are and how far they are and put them in a big graph. And then you just keep doing that and doing that until you get this nice set of patterns."

Flowers says Kozoru has found something valuable. Experts may disagree. The idea is nothing new, says Marti Hearst, an assistant professor in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California-Berkeley. "This is a very standardized approach in the field," Hearst says. "In fact, this is what everyone in the field does now. It's like saying about FedEx that they use airplanes to deliver packages."

However unique its approach, the Kozoru team ran into problems. For one thing, not all questions are as simple as "Who is Gordon Downie?" Ask an Irishman "Who is the Great Emancipator?" and he's apt to say radical Catholic lawyer Daniel O'Connell, not Abraham Lincoln. A question like "Does God exist?" introduces even more variables.

"The big realization for us along the way was that we built this system that's really powerful, and it's right a lot, but there's a subjectivity to questions that you can't produce mathematically," Flowers says. "It's like trying to understand emotion — you just can't do it."

So the holy grail of natural-language search remains elusive — much like Flowers himself.

Flowers says he was born in Topeka in 1970. He tells the Pitch that he was adopted and his father (now deceased) was in the military. His grandmother bought him his first computer. "I grew up really poor, so it was a big deal," he says. "It was a $600 computer."