Kosmix, until now a vertical search engine for information about health, automobiles and travel, transformed itself into a universal search engine for all subjects earlier today during a general redesign.

The move has been anticipated since at least last September, and was described by co-founder Anand Rajaraman in a Beet.tv interview posted less than a week ago.

Now when users conduct keyword searches on Kosmix (much as they would on a traditional search engine like Google or Ask), they are presented with mashups of results from a variety of sources. Unlike Mahalo, Kosmix itself doesn’t publish any of the content it displays. Rather, it pulls it all from services like Flickr, Google, Wikipedia, TheFind, Yahoo Answers, Amazon, Truveo, and YouTube.

Results from each of these sources are shown in their own modules, which are packed rather tightly in a three column layout. We hear that there are hundreds of possible modules, although only a small subset of these show up for each query.

Tags: amazon, anticipation, automobiles, beet, co founder, column layout, content, engine, flickr, google, health, keyword, keywords, kosmix, last september, mashups, present, publishers, queries, search, search engine, subset, traditional, truveo, tv interview, universal, users, vertical, vertical search engine, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube