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YouTube videos referenced included “L. Ron Hubbard. The Xenu Story” and videos that were even farther removed from the searched topic. So, yes, this shows that Kosmix is mortal. And that social media is incredibly difficult to master. To answer the obvious question, “Have we found anything else that does a better job of tracking all of social?” No, we haven’t.

But run a search for refrigerator on Google, Bing or Yahoo, and you’ll get tons of listings and, for the first several pages at least, they all refer to the big cooling units. Not an L. Ron Hubbard video in sight. (No disrespect intended to Mr. Hubbard. I’m sure he’s a fine religion founder, but when faced with a busted icebox and a kitchen full of spoiling food, his videos are not top-of-mind.)

We could try and make the excuse that tweets use their own special shorthand jargon and that it’s hard to understand context, beyond a simple word-match search. But isn’t that exactly what Kosmix sold to Wal-Mart, the premise that it had figured out how to accurately and comprehensively decode the utterances from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social network sites?

We don’t want to make light of this situation. The other social search engines today—for example, search.twitter.com—mostly limit themselves to searching for precise words. For “refrigerator,” its results are just as bad as those we found at Kosmix. Then again, it delivered precisely what it promised: an accurate word-match.

Perhaps that’s the real issue? Not that Kosmix is weak, but that it pitched itself as such a social-site genius that we actually believed some of it was true. That’s cool, though. It’s not as though Kosmix was selling itself for $300 million or anything.

Retail due diligence is great with spreadsheets, earnings figures, profits and operating costs. But when it comes to assessing cleverness or subject mastery, things get messy. Lawyers and accountants can’t help here, and that’s where the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) people invariably turn.

Even worse than that is when people feel they are weak in an area and try to hire subject matter experts to help them. By definition, the people with the checkbooks—the ones who have decided they need the expert help—are ill-equipped to perform due diligence on the expertise of the candidates.

If you’re trying to hire an RFID expert for a new initiative, wouldn’t you have your best RFID people in the room during parts of the interview, specifically to report to you if the applicants are indeed knowledgeable RFID experts? Otherwise, they could BS you for hours and you’d never know (assuming that you personally are not comfortable with RFID nuances).

Did Wal-Mart test the position that these people had truly mastered social site searches? Or did its execs see impressive resumes and executive track records and assume the best?

The chances are that Wal-Mart didn’t really need to have people who had figured out the answers as much as it needed a large team of people who were well positioned to figure out how find those answers. Still, the current Kosmix site isn’t filling people with a lot of competency confidence.