Slashdot Mirror

1. It looks cool, clearly has the potential, but the algorithms for grouping the results is bad, which results in excessive exploring and browsing. Also, the program emphasises grouping of categories instead of grouping the links. So you open categories, which contain categories, which contain categories, when you would really like a clearly market relevant link.
2. Many results, all visible (to some extent) at once - rather impressive. Created two categories for the explorer and the city immediately. Zooming to more categories didn't show anything, zooming again shows bikes and zooming again showed "International", which had the links to charity. In the first step there were categories for Guide, Hotels, Local, Weather, News, Area, which might have been helpful if we were looking for the North Carolina city. The category for Sir Walter Raleigh appears to be very well structured. Interestingly, the bikes category had information about biking IN Raleigh (links to TriangleMTB mountain biking association).
3. Quite slow. It collects a lot of information during grokking, with results being gradually added to the concept map.
4. After expanding the map twice (clicking on the More Categories), there was one named "Average". It immediately caught my eye and after mousing over it I found a familiar title (the page, which had the IQ=60 answer). It's not as visible as it was in Google, but still better than nothing and a dedicated searcher would have probably found it.
5. Had the category "Local time in Sydney", which had a link to the main page of World Time Server. Nothing better than that.

Kartoo:

1. Looks nice, there are a lot of additional options near the edges (found sites, refinements, etc.), but it just fails to find relevant links and present them in a coherent way.
2. Enough results, but the scope doesn't look as impressive as in Grokker. Had some pretty maps, with many links and keywords for the North Carolina city. Completely useless if you were looking for other "raleighs".
3. Rather slow.
4. After some browsing and page checking, found this one, where TARA, a 10 month Alsatian/Husky mix gal from Lloret de Mar, Girona Spain apparently scored 95 on an IQ test. Not something BBC had in mind, but still.
5. Nothing even remotedly relevant. Very irrelevant results!

Mooter:

1. Looks very simple, no clutter at all. The visual part is mostly a gimmick, as it doesn't provide anything a simple list of refinements can't.
2. Few results, some less pretty maps. Nothing useful, besides city-related links.
3. Very fast.
4. It had the 95 semi-result, but not the real one. Funny, the 3rd cluster had such refinements as "lap dog republican red state moron" and "attack dog on bush military service". :)
5. The refinements weren't really needed, since the question is so simple and the timeanddate.com result is so prevalent. But anyway, clicking on "sydney", "current", "time", "australian" or "wales" brought the list of results where the link to curr

1. It looks cool, clearly has the potential, but the algorithms for grouping the results is bad, which results in excessive exploring and browsing. Also, the program emphasises grouping of categories instead of grouping the links. So you open categories, which contain categories, which contain categories, when you would really like a clearly market relevant link.
2. Many results, all visible (to some extent) at once - rather impressive. Created two categories for the explorer and the city immediately. Zooming to more categories didn't show anything, zooming again shows bikes and zooming again showed "International", which had the links to charity. In the first step there were categories for Guide, Hotels, Local, Weather, News, Area, which might have been helpful if we were looking for the North Carolina city. The category for Sir Walter Raleigh appears to be very well structured. Interestingly, the bikes category had information about biking IN Raleigh (links to TriangleMTB mountain biking association).
3. Quite slow. It collects a lot of information during grokking, with results being gradually added to the concept map.
4. After expanding the map twice (clicking on the More Categories), there was one named "Average". It immediately caught my eye and after mousing over it I found a familiar title (the page, which had the IQ=60 answer). It's not as visible as it was in Google, but still better than nothing and a dedicated searcher would have probably found it.
5. Had the category "Local time in Sydney", which had a link to the main page of World Time Server. Nothing better than that.

Kartoo:

1. Looks nice, there are a lot of additional options near the edges (found sites, refinements, etc.), but it just fails to find relevant links and present them in a coherent way.
2. Enough results, but the scope doesn't look as impressive as in Grokker. Had some pretty maps, with many links and keywords for the North Carolina city. Completely useless if you were looking for other "raleighs".
3. Rather slow.
4. After some browsing and page checking, found this one, where TARA, a 10 month Alsatian/Husky mix gal from Lloret de Mar, Girona Spain apparently scored 95 on an IQ test. Not something BBC had in mind, but still.
5. Nothing even remotedly relevant. Very irrelevant results!

Mooter:

1. Looks very simple, no clutter at all. The visual part is mostly a gimmick, as it doesn't provide anything a simple list of refinements can't.
2. Few results, some less pretty maps. Nothing useful, besides city-related links.
3. Very fast.
4. It had the 95 semi-result, but not the real one. Funny, the 3rd cluster had such refinements as "lap dog republican red state moron" and "attack dog on bush military service". :)
5. The refinements weren't really needed, since the question is so simple and the timeanddate.com result is so prevalent. But anyway, clicking on "sydney", "current", "time", "australian" or "wales" brought the list of results where the link to curr

1. No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
   
2. 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
   
3. 7 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
   
2. Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
   
3. 10 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

1. 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
   
2. 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
   
3. 5 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.

I would like grokker interface.

Why isn't the file selector a corba service then
the file selector could be devloped independed of gtk ?

Looks like a neat tool for navigating data. To those who say Google is enough: do you use Google to navigate your hard drive? Do you ever follow links on a web page or do you always Google to the linked page? Even Google has multiple types of searches.

Those screenshots look a lot like the Pad demos on the web page of Ken Perlin (my former advisor). Compare, for example, the Grokker web browser with the Pad site tour (which has been online since 1998).