Slashdot Mirror
Kartoo Search Engine Presents Results as a Map
cdupree writes "I've just run across a search engine called Kartoo---anyone else know it? Apparently it's been up since April 25. It presents its results in a graphical fashion, sort of like a map, allowing you to refine your query interactively. Admittedly, the "working" picture is a bit dorky, but the site is not dripping with ads (except for itself), and it's interesting to see the connections it finds when you enter, for example, "slashdot." My initial take on the thing is, it looks pretty, it presents the standard information in a new and different manner, but I haven't used it enough to get much in-depth knowledge of how best to use it. Has anyone had experience with this method of presenting search results? Is there background available on the folks who produced it beyond the trivial amount on the web site?" This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results. Update: 05/28 14:29 GMT by T : Laurent Baleydier adds: "Since last night, kartoo's requests have been multiplied by 20. At this moment, we can't respond to all those
requests. We really apologize and we are doing as fast as possible in order to give you the best services."
Pretty interface and nice flowchart of interrelated subjects and sites. Pretty neat.
A search for "porn" took 20 seconds... I don't think this search engine is up to snuff for the internet. :)
The next thing I got was a graphical representation of the /. effect.
I stole this Sig
It'll hardly take the place of google as my preferred search engine, just too damn slow. But I love a good diagram... and the way it displays the results is very cool... I like it :)
Searches take entirely too long (about ten seconds. May not seem like alot, but it adds up) and the main page is Flash galore. You are also redirected immediately when you enter, so you have to hit "back" *realfast* to get back to Slashdot. The idea of presenting results as a web is kinda neat, but it ends at "kinda neat." The results are confusing and look disturbingly similar to the area of the computer tables behind my three computers--everything interconnected and difficult to follow.
I commend them on creating an original and refreshingly different idea in search engines, but I doubt Google has anything to worry about.
At least they run Linux
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Remember the search engine called Northern Light that organised information into folders? When you searched you could click on topics on a toolbar to refine the search. I dont' know if it's still up but it would be at www.northernlight.com
"It's even worse if you're locked into a proprietary operating system." -http://www.wehavethewayout.com/scale.asp?rew=0
I just used Mozilla RC2 (on Mandrake 8.1) to try a search on myself. It was the non-Flash version and I had to dismiss something like 50+ Javascript popup messages.
Needless to say, I'm already not a fan of the site. Perhaps in time it will prove to be more usable.
Well, I found it very limited in many ways, especially to pull up larger numbers of results. When I tried to do a search for my own domain, it didn't even find it, but it did find domains owned by other people with the same name. Yeah, it's cool, but it's not gonna replace google for me. :)
I don't know if we the search engine is too slow or if the slashdot traffic just knocked it out but something seems terribly wrong.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
The relevant results are due to kartoo's new "hamster-rank"-system. They are small, smart and they don't fly away. They don't pick on you eather.
I think i'll stick with google until it takes less than a minute to succesfully search for something google does in 5 seconds
Assuming it'll be slashdotted, for the curious, what it does is something like a graphical Alexa. It shows the main thing you searched for as a sort of you-are-here dot that you can click on, and then it shows related sites and keywords in a connect-the-dots type of image. So I entered slashdot, and got slashdot.org as the main result, but with "linux" and some other keywords around it. I clicked "linux" and got a new graphic with some linux sites, OSDN, and some other related stuff.
It does seem useful, but on Windows, I'd rather just click the "Related" button in IE and get Alexa's list. Here on my Linux box, this is a good substitute for Opera and Konq to use.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
Can anyone make a mirror in case it gets /.ted?
IANAL, but imagine a beowulf cluster of in Soviet Russia all your belong are base to us welcoming the new SCO overlords.
Slashdotted in less than 3 minutes.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
It claimed no search results for Slashdot. :P
"this looks pretty stupid"
Did this post leave anybody else aching for a more sophisticated opinion?
"Derp de derp."
It uses and displays the results of other indexers or crawlers such as Google. It's basically a meta front end for searches.
The Flash version is a bit slow, even on huge pipes and a faster client.
That was horrible...I got about a hundred JavaScript error messages...the Slashdotting sure can be brutal
This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results.
Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.
Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
Well, good thing you posted it on Slashdot. Everyone site should go down at least once ever 3 months.
While the graphical map of results is nice, the length of time a search takes is unacceptable. If this is a result of a /. effect, then it needs better hosting, hardware, etc before it can expect to be taken seriously.
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed... Oh wait, he does.
Since we can now add "Search Engine" to the list of sites we've killed, here's a mirror of what the search results look like if you're lucky enough to get that far.
Can't quite see the point of it myself. I like a ranked list, like Google.
I don't have flash, so i used the html version. Searched for "linux" and it came up, said results 1-10. But there was nothing displayed. moved my mouse around and i got an incredible ammount of annoying ass javascript error boxes, an endless stream of one after another. Couldn't get to X to close the tab, couldn't close mozilla the proper way, had to kill it.
Bad first impression.
Frankly I think it should have warned me about needing javascript or similar stupid shit. I wouldn't have bothered.
Go google.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Try a search for "Fuckhead", and see a fine map of Capitol Hill emerging.
Either their server is extremely shaky (slashdotted after only 2 posts (without even a "first" one :-), can that really happen?), or it doesn't work behind a firewall. It keeps saying "the connection with kartoo failed", even with a 3 minute timeout setting. Seems a bit useless to me...
Linux user since early January 1992.
I did a search on "Star Wars" and saw this neat looking graphic. I then clicked on "Lucas" and then waited. And waited. And waited. The counter at the bottom of the screen went past 30. Then it timed out with the message:
:-)"
"the connection with kartoo failed. If the problem persists, you can send a message on kartoo@kartoo.com and we will try to find a solution.
I sure hope this search engine does something that the others cannot do. Because no one is going to want to wait more than 3 seconds for results. The standard to meet or beat is Google's (decent results in short period of time).
Is he smoking a green, jagged cigarette, or is a green thunderbolt protruding from his right cheek? Which of those downward bent lines is supposed to be his mouth? The image looks like something from a dream after I've had too much pizza before going to bed.
Miko O'Sullivan
Well it doesn't work for me NS4.5, Flash installed but Javascript disabled.
;-)
It sat there for 40 seconds counting away the seconds and then told me:
"the connection with kartoo failed. If the problem persists, you can send us a message on kartoo@kartoo.com and we will try to find a solution:-)"
Maybe it didn't like my firewall? maybe javascript is mandatory? Maybe it's just slashdotted?
Whatever the reason, I see little use for a search engine that doesn't work -- regardless of how pretty the graphics are
"Just what everyone needs: a flash-based UI for a search engine."
Did it ever occur to you that Flash isn't the cause of your annoyance, it's the people who make the flash movies? Attack of the Clones sucked, but don't blame Digital Film for it.
"Derp de derp."
Results 1 - 10 of about 43,800,000. Search took 0.28 seconds. -- google
kartoo counts in full seconds, let my try to emphasize this *FULL SECONDS* and then it tells you it couldn't connect. Okay it's suffering from /. effects, but what kind of a search engine is this if it can't handle massive load?
I won't be bookmarking it
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
Pretty useless in it's current form. Yes, it's a cool idea, but it's slow, ugly, and it doesn't find things very well at all.
I did a search for "Hank Hill", and after clicking through a few hundred Javascript alerts I got such fine choices as:
Terry Love's Plumbing and Remodel advice
The director of Bell labs' buisness personal page
A page called 'Movie Reviews', giving the most generic movie reviews I've ever seen
And a guide to Snow Hill, Maryland
Yes, on Google and Teoma, etc., you can find this links... but not in the Top 10 links! The idea is good, but the search isn't.
It's getting slashdotted... I think we'd better check google's cache. At least it won't dump 3 megs of flash onto our screens }:)
Engage!
"Kartoo" sounds like the greek for "map", which is "hArtes". (that's related to "paper" and "chart" as well.)
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Incase anyone was wondering what it looked like, here's a screenshot from one of the help pages: screenshot
- MbM
The flash version does not work behind a firewall not sure why but it doesn :(
The html version is tuffed full of javascript errors on geko (galeon) is does look pretty and could have uses. Tried it on my uni and it showed me who was closely linked to it oh well maybe a slashdotting and a few emails they will fix the javascript and flash version
still not sure why the firewall would break it. I am only allowed http via a proxy so i wonder what else it needs/ wants and why ?
I'd wager that I know a number of Mac users who are more sophisticated computer users than you are. Sure that's a flame, but it's a fairly safe wager.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Back in college, I would participate in research studies to earn a little extra money. One of the studies was of a 3D graphical method of laying out links to web sites. I was given time to look over the program, then they asked me to find certain information.
It was pretty interesting, the program was similar to the interface to Chime for chemistry, you could zoom in and out and rotate the link structure. I'm not sure what the result of the research was, and I'd say it was a toss up as to whether it was easier to use or not.
Maybe the CS grad student that did the research reads slashdot and he can tell us how it turned out.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
When I ran it I got a hard crash from bad javascript. No thanks.
sulli
RTFJ.
Well, cool stuff but the lines between each nodes pass on one another so much that it is hard to read. They really should consider using vcg.
So the image creating scripts are hosted on another machine "nfrance.com". But the really cool thing is that you can make the thing say whatever you want by changing the URL of the image a bit. See:
I'm sure if you put in enough effort you could draw pictures
of course slash-code f's with the URL so here's an smlnk: (ps. smlnk.com shortens URLs mostly for usenet or irc postings so don't be freaked out be the redirect)
http://smlnk.com/?EPRZ4J7R
This is slashdot. Nifty, but not terribly useful is what we call content.
God sucks at running this place. Impeach God at
I used mozilla rc2 when I went there; I don't have Flash enabled (read "I don't have Flash *working*), so I also used the html version. It was slow, Yes, but it worked, I did not get a lot of javascript errors.
[btw, one of the searches I did, and the one which most impressed me, was for the name of a friend of mine -- she has an unusual name, and is a writer with some things scattered around the Net. The results were surprisingly all actually her, and shown in one blob like that actually made sense. Wouldn't want that result style for all searches, but in this case it worked well.]
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Back in the day, the pre-Compaq day -- when men were men and AltaVista was a project at DEC -- they offered a java applet which rendered your search as a network of related topics. You could interactively refine your search by adjusting the fittness of the various topics in the map. Ahh, the good old days.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Your an idiot. I'm sorry but your experiance with UI must be limited to some nasty KDE or Windows, both blow compared tot he Mac GUI. Given KDE is much nicer than the Windows but far from the Aqua goodiness of OS X. It's the bad interfaces that give GUI's bad names- GUI's can be just as fast as command line, it just takes getting people to pull there heads out of there asses. Go and read some Jef Raskin.
This may be a flame, but so was the comment posted.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Over at this area of map.net there is something even better- a web directory represented as physical locations located on parts of Antarctica (and the site also has the domain name antarcti.ca for its services). It uses data from the Open Directory Project, formerly GNUhoo, a directory that is somewhat open and is a better one than Yahoo's directory, and one that Google uses in large part to find relevant results.
I typed "slashdot-effect" and the pic of that weird looking genie changed into a tired, wrinkled, and bitter-looking old man...
Maybe they should have thought twice before posting their advertisement to slashdot!
"The scientist describes what is; The engineer creates what never was." - Theodore von Karman
Hey dudes, I've been playing around with the HTML version of the search engine (not sure what's wrong with Flash...) and got some interesting results.
& l=1&s=0&lp=1
A lot of people have been complaining about the slow response compared to google, and so on. Well let's not worry about that right now, let's look at what it does do interesting.
Google is used for very specific searches, and Kartoo doesn't really change that. Instead, I used Kartoo to do a general search. I typed in "Robocop'. Here is the link:
http://www.kartoo.com/kartoo2/servlet/H?q=robocop
Notice it shows a few sites, and even a few words giving you hints about what the site is about. I think this is where some people had some trouble, though. This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
It's pretty cool that at a glance I know what that site is going to show me before I actually read it's description when I move my mouse over it. Right away, without having to read much at all, I knew that I could find pictures of Robocop, information about the movies, and even a hint that there was a series to Robocop.
This is where the speed comes. Google is fast and all, but I've never found info this fast on a general topic such as "Robocop".
Go try it out! You'll see what I mean. I don't know if this particular site will become popular, but I do think that it proves that the graphical search enging concept is viable and interesting. I'd still use Google for very specific questions I have, but if I wanted to know about general topics, this would be a very handy place to look
"Derp de derp."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No need for the "*",1,1 for datasettes AFAIK.
A simple:
lO
would suffice.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Kartoo surrenders.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Yah, damn Macromedia for giving us a graphical alternative to HTML! Damn them all!
:P
In all seriousness, I understand the complaints about flash, heck it annoys me too. But I don't blame Flash or Macromedia, just the crappy use of it. This is the second time I've seen a practical use of it. The first time was when a friend of mine created a statistic site using Flash to do the fancy graphic work.
I think sites that use Flash are generally pretty annoying, but as I said, the technology isn't the problem. It's the people who think they need to create a teaser for their site who are creating the problem.
"Derp de derp."
If you click on the Options button at Kartoo you can select which search engines to use.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
Well... if I visit your link I'm prompted to a infinite netscape alert message after running the mouse over a map node, had to kill the process. This isn't quite the result I expected....
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searching for "The truth about Bill Gates"
...
The result is some kind of swastika
The technology as such doesn't annoy me, but I do consider it completely useless. Everything I need can be done in plain HTML.
So much for load testing - Did anyone give them a heads up? At least there should be someone on duty since France, etc does not have a Memorial Day, at least not on the USA schedule of holidays.
Looks like it is back to Ask Taco for me
;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Wow, depending on which browser I use, it looks either like a screenful of JAVASCRIPT ALERTS or the KDE bomb (Konquerer dying with a segfault).
score: F+
Yeah.. that's why I mentioned the bit about my using IE 5. Sorry man.
"Derp de derp."
try this, it's hilarious!
graspee
I know this won't sway your feelings for Flash, but I've had ideas I wanted to pursue with it that I thought would make for a better user experience.
:)
I'll give you a really simple example: One of my biggest annoyances with the web is that every single page has to take a few seconds to connect, once it does the info comes down quickly. I'd prefer if I could download all the data from the site (connect once and then burst it down...) and then view it rapidly.
Flash allows you to do this. You have one download, and then you set up flash to click through the relevant information. No need for fancy graphics (though you could if you wish...), and you can make the page smoothly scale to whatever resolution you want. I'd really like to be able take Slashdot, for example, and scale it up a bit so I can read the text better.
Anyhoo.. I know I won't change your mind about it, I just wanted to offer a potential for Flash that would be incredibly useful if anybody used it properly.
"Derp de derp."
Well, it may work with IE due to the webmaster using "stupid browser tricks" but I got javascript errors popping up faster than I could close them using the HTML site in Mozilla 0.9.9. I finally had to "killall -9 mozilla-bin" to get off the site. A search site has got to be browser-agnostic if it's going to succeed commercially.
/. effect.
If you ask me, the site's not ready for prime time, and it's damn sure not load-balanced well enough to withstand the
utter rubbish
Search engines are best when they're young. No matter how good their algorithms or how impressive their hardware, over time two effects come to dominate the search results:
1. Dredge starts to accumulate in the form of dead links, evaporated hosts and redundant/irrelevant information. Combating this in turn might lead to
2. Consolidation and stratification of the relatively few "constants", which usually translates to a high predominance of trustworthy but staid (e.g. corporate) results. Often a diminishing of the number of voices is the result.
Therefore it's nice (brave...) to see a new search engine come along. Google is wonderful, but it is beginning to show it's age. Maybe we just need a new search engine every couple of years.
I once saw a website for a company that claimed to be "search engine experts". Their entire site was in flash, which meant that search engines like Google couldn't index any of it. A friend of mine was searching for the site, and had used two search terms: the name of the company and the word "Ireland", which is where the company is based. He got zero hits. I suggested that he take out "Ireland" and try again. Then Google got a hit on their site. It's not too smart to put everything in flash if you expect text search engines to help people find your site. These people had basically NO TEXT which directly translated to NO HITS. Think about that.
It also means that people who use browsers which don't have flash plugins can't see anything that's in the flash section. If that's your whole site, they can't get any information at all. One group in particular is blind people using Lynx and a screen reader. Those people are unfairly discriminated against because they can't see sites which are all flash, nor can they effectively use sites which depend heavily on Javascript. Web site designers need to design their sites to avoid these problems, and they need to test their sites to make sure that people can read what's on the site even if they don't have MS Internet Exploder with Flash and Javascript enabled. At least Kartoo has HTML and plain text options - somebody planned ahead. Good on them. Many other sites don't, like Hotmail. You used to be able to use Lynx to access Hotmail, now you can't. Microsoft has excluded blind people from their website.
How would this differ from HTTP/1.1, which can also connect once and then download everything through the same connection?
Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text.
I can't quite figure out why their genie icon has a vagina on his head (or a cherry on his ear). Is it a tribute to the search engine-porn connection?
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
"How would this differ from HTTP/1.1, which can also connect once and then download everything through the same connection?"
:P
Because even with HTTP 1.1, you'll download one page from a site, and when you go to the next one you have to reconnect and have the new data come down. With Flash, it is possible to encapsulate the entire site into one Flash file and fire it down. There may be javascript tricks you could do with HTML too, now that I think about it.\
"Why would I need Flash for this? I can also scale HTML text."
No, you can make the fonts bigger and smaller, you can't scale them.
If you're an Opera User, then you do have that ability. They have a zoom tool where you can put in a percentage and it'll scale the site, images and all. The downside, though, is that they don't do any image processing to make the effect smoother. FLash can.
"Derp de derp."
It could be worse--results could be shown as .pdf's.
Heh. Oookay. So now you're stalking me so you can call me a twit? Heh. What country are you from anyway? I've never been somewhere where the word 'Twit' could be used offensively.
"Derp de derp."
Wow, It's flash! I thought it didn't work because it was slashdoted.
I removed Macromedia software when all the flash control vanished due to some over ambitious advertisers. When a right click on an ad produced nothing but "About Macromedia" and ads started covering up content and moving over the pages, was the straw that convinced me the player was totaly out of control.
That was the day Macromedia software was uninstalled. Does anybody know of a flash player that has controls that can't be disabled by the advertiser?
A player that came up like Winamp Media player with a full set of controls would be nice.
Required, the X button in the corner of the player must not be overridden. Un-stoppable software need not apply.
The truth shall set you free!
I honestly don't understand what you're saying...
Explain please?
"Derp de derp."
However, the best site on the web for getting a good answer to any query is the Oracle of Ya-Hoot
I am simply amazed every time I ask "the Oracle" a question and I get a good answer. You have to be patient...sometimes it takes days to get an answer, but I always get one and it's always goo.
I have no idea how it works. It's probably some AI thing or a neural network on a linux cluster.
--
Ask the Ya-Hoot Oracle Anything!
First off, it's pretty fruity. Secondly, it's pretty slow. Finally, it's pretty annoying cause you can't easily go back...
Hehe that's a nice one :)
Thanks for the tip!
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What kind of search engine turns up no links (none, zero, zip, nada) when searching for "bell labs" ?
I assume their server is aflame or something.
I wont use it. I am opposed to the existence of France and the French in every way, shape, and/or form.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
(offtopic - about the StumbleUpon sig)
/usr/lib/mozilla !!! since when is doing stuff like that "done right?" (Then again, I might just be paranoid since I let a lot of people have accounts on my machines for evangelical reasons.)
I tried installing it as user and it failed since it didn't have permission to write to the proper directories/files. It then told me to fix the problem by giving everyone read/write access to
wget is a little (unixy) http file download utility. -r means download the entire directory. Therefor you could use it to download a whole web-page to browse. It'd be a hassle to do it like this for every site though, not very practical.
"I have fallen off the wagon, for I am a slave to tea."
Odd, seems to work fine in Omniweb, which everyone always complains has bad javascript support.
"I have fallen off the wagon, for I am a slave to tea."
The search engine was slashdotted, no big surprise there. But the thing that will keep me from ever visiting this site again is that when I repeated clicked the Back button and hit Alt-Left, I kept getting their page. Anybody who pulls that lame crap to keep people from backing out of their site SUCKS DONKEY.
This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
:)
Worked wonderfully for me using Opera 6.01 under WinXP, and Opera 6.0 under Linux. No IE here
The site actually goes out of its way to detect Mozilla and give it different JS... then it has that whole section of code not written and instead has some debug crap someone never bothered to take out. The debug crap is what people are seeing.
For once I got to something early on thanks to a tip from a friend and it was mostly stable running Moz 0.98 under Mac OS 9.1 over cable although once or thrice it seemed to stop accepting input into its search bar.
I'd been waiting for somebody to try something genuinely useful with Flash for a while, at least useful beyond providing something to hide behind when you haven't got any real content, and while Kartoo is nice enough to now be near the top of my five miles of mostly unsorted bookmarks, one side of me wishes that they'd waited for SVG to be a bit more available.
Maybe I was lucky in my first choice, but I opted for "complexity nonlinear emergence" and was richly rewarded. The visual presentation of results and associated keywords seemed like a significant step forward and led me to a bunch of useful cross disciplinary sites that I haven't had a chance to more than skim yet.
It has been interesting to compare Kartoo with Google Sets that was discussed here last week. Both are novel approaches to situating search items in context, but at least for "complexity nonlinear emergence" Google Sets is singularly unhelpful.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
They are doing something simmilar at Antarti.ca.
might i suggest http://www.kartoo.com/kartooen.html
html only version, should be much happier with mozilla.
If you want a neat mapped interface to the Web, look at antarcti.ca. It was created by Tim Bray, one of the original editors of the XML specification.
Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear if we would just sit down and keep still. -C. Coolidge
Neat idea, poor implementation. (Now, where have we seen that before?)
It's slow, and graphically intense, not really something one looks for in a screensaver, a several of my searches failed. One of the reasons Google's so popular is its speed and lack of goobldy-gook.
A very neat thing, though that big floating head's a bit freaky, and I'm sure it'll be great if they can ever get it to run faster (Maybe trim down a bit on the effects)
Love and Peace,
Valen Faerlwynd
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen
Yeah, actually... I haven't played with Mozilla much, I'm sure there's a relatively simple way to do it, but with IE and hidden iframes, you can send and retrieve arbitrary data to the server without reloading the page at all. Since IE can dynamically rewrite (almost) any part of the page, you can update the data on your page, or even the UI, while still working off of the same "document". Great examples of how this is used well are all the web apps for doing taxes that I saw this year. Hell, look at MSDN online, they use DHTML all over the place to make it just that much nicer for the user. It was very nearly like using a native application, except no downloads and a little slower at runtime.
Most of what you would want to do is also possible in NS 4, but not nearly as easy as in IE. And NS 4 is definately quirkier in this aspect, and more prone to crash.
Even cooler is IE 5+'s (and I think Mozilla, now, but I think the mechanism is slightly different) ability to generate and view HTML pages with XSL + XML on the client side. So you could hit a site, and it would return an XML document with a processing instruction specifying the location of the XSL... IE will just grab the XSL and use it to transform the XML into HTML, and then display that resulting HTML. That's okay, but also easily done on the server side. The really interesting thing is that you have access to both the XML document and the XSL document via a DOM interface from the client-side javascript. So you can modify your XSL document and then re-transform parts of the XML document into HTML snippets, and then replace parts of the current page with the resulting HTML.
It makes for a very responsive web application - feels like a sluggish native app instead of a set of web pages - but it locks you down to a platform fairly prohibitively. NS 4, Opera, Lynx and most other "independent" browsers do not have XML+XSL support, so you pretty much lock those out. You can't use the same XSLs for server-side transforms and client-side transforms if you want to do the dynamic client-side stuff, really. There might be a way to do a Mozilla and IE cross-platform solution with this, but I haven't investigated it at all.
We did a lot of this at my last company. We had a web application for managing certain database objects, and you could run searches and you'd get back a data set by loading the data (as XML) in a hidden frame, then we could sort the data by making a strategic change to the XSL in memory and retransforming a strategic part of the XML, so it happened in a blip. We even supported pagination completely on the client - we were in a situation where the client to server network connection wasn't really the bottleneck, since both were intended to be on the same internal network. Client memory/rendering speed was the bigger bottleneck. Both bandwidth and table-rendering speed cause this sort of thing to really stop scaling for larger datasets. It also uses a TON of memory, because the (w3c) DOM is a bit heavy, and with this method IE retains everything in a DOM, whether you like it or not.
I suppose this is all somewhat off-topic to a story about a search engine, but this happens to be something I have worked with recently, so I thought I would mention it.
Other good DHTML links:
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
Obviously there are many different ways to do this, for example, use other criteria such as noun phrases instead of words, and there are lots of variations within just this particular implementation. I can't actually see what Kartoo is doing because the site isn't working for me, but I suspect it's something similar -- I think the 'Topics' is for example the word or phrase category map and the 'Sites' is the document map.
Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
Not only did it crash my Mozilla, but once it detects java capability, it disables the option of using either the html or text version. You have to delete the cookies in order to get access to html or text. If you block cookies from the site, it goes automatically to the java version without offering the html or text version.
The map is apparently meaningless, and calls up an endlessly looping java application error message from which there is no escape except to kill Mozilla.
And the java version searches endlessly, often without finding anything. Good grief, it's a meta search engine. How can it not find anything, when the search engines it's searching can find all sorts of things using the same search string?
I think it's garbage.
This stuff was done b4 by AltaVista, though they took it off 'cause they said "it's a bandwidth hungry app. and we can't afford it".
It was very nice, worked fast, and I found a lot of info with it, that was very hard to find any other way.
Maybe Kartoo will fill the void, but it will take time.
I remembered having tested this site last year.
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
oh yeah...because the bloated PDF API used in Aqua is known as being a fast display method. Quit trolling
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
I agree...
The biggest criticism I have for Flash interfaces is that authors always break the current web UI standards. Flash is more "expressive", therefore designers go all out. Users, on the other hand, get confused whenever a new interface paradigm is presented to them.
WebBrain is slightly different but far more interesting and certainly more refined. It'll be quicker for you to click the link and try for yourself rather than read my explanation. Warning: the sight wants to see that you're using IE or Netscape and requires JVM 1.1.
The site is /.ted now, so I've not been able to have a real look at it. It sounds though as a concept I've seen from a Dutch company called Medialab.
They developped a product called the aquabrowser which accomplishes associative searches: clicking on a keyword will bring up related keywords. The more a word is related the more it floats to the top.
The site where: "I'm right, as long as you ignore the things that prove me wrong", became a valid method of debate.
Is it really true that Slashdot only just realised this kind of thing has been quietly adding extra time to your searches to give you some flash graphical map?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
It's been up much longer than that.
Actually, a colleague told me about this site sometime last year. I don't recall exactly when that was, but since he resigned in April 2001, it was before that.
It's actually quite fast if you're in Europe (it's a French site).
The GUI was obviously redone recently, and although it looks more bloated than before, it's actually faster.
Fabien BERNARD.
Just to add to the catalogue: worked for me with Galeon 1.2.0 & Flash 5.
"Every good boy deserves fudge"
GPG: 66F0 CD0A 9EC6 367F C3B4 7EB0 C76D CFBE 86CF 21E4
OK: The interface is non-intuitive, the 'mapped' results are inscrutable (and mostly irrlevant), and they homepage contained a whine about the 20-fold increase in traffic since the slashdot article appeared. Not ready for prime time. And located in France (does this mean it was a fine French whine??). I'll stick with Google......
HTTP/1.1 allows you to keep a connection open until a timeout expires, but anyway, your suggestion sounds like solving a problem with the transport layer in the content layer. If there is a problem with the performance of HTTP, it should IMHO be solved by rectifying HTTP.
Since we're comparing technologies, not implementations, you'll surely agree that there is nothing inherent in the technology of HTML that prevents scaling.
That said, the ability of Mozilla to scale all text (but not the images) and to specify a minimum font size is sufficient for me. YMMV, of course.
The biggest criticism I have for Flash interfaces is that authors always break the current web UI standards.
I'll just settle for a Flash or DHTML scrollbar that pays attention to the fact I've got a scrollwheel. If people really MUST re-invent standard UI elements, they should at least do it right.
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Has anyone had a chance to try the clustering option ?
/.ing (using "chocolate cake")
Is this the first full web search tool to display results using dynamic clustering ?
I only had a brief play with the non-clustering version prior to
and thought it summarised the options very well. The speed wasn't great but not too bad either for the work I think it was doing. If they can work on scalability a bit more perhaps they'll have something.
A while ago I implemented a dynamic clustering search/refine system based on a Xerox PARC idea called "Scatter-Gather". Potentially, it gives good results, but since clustering is naturally
an O(n^2) operation, you need to find shortcuts to make it quick enough.
Clustering is finding groups of documents in a collection which interrelate more to each other than to the other documents. e.g. the results for "chocolate cake" would hopefully partition into cake recipes, cake shops, cake mix, diet tips, chocolate appreciation societies etc etc..
From what I've seen, my guess is that with clustering off (the default) it's doing some sort of pseudo-clustering a bit like this:
* Starts with an indexing search engine's results.
* Re-indexes these or their summaries, binning the usual stop words like pronouns and weighting by frequency in the sub-collection.
* Picks some distinctive/distant vectors, i.e
documents which contain few overlaps with each other.( picking a few samples O(nlogn) ? )
* Labels them with their distinctive terms and displays.
* Allows the initial "Google" search to be refined +/- these terms.
With clustering on, I'd guess the main differences to be in the document sampling and query refinement. I'll take another look in a couple of days time. Has anyone tried it out ?
Clustering is expensive, but I still think it's a useful tool for presenting and refining results. This is the best example I've seen so far. The graphical presentation feels fairly natural and intuitive.
It would be a nice option to have on Google to say "cluster my results", when you notice there are distinct classes of result you want to isolate. I'd wait 30s for that.
Colin
"Every good boy deserves fudge"
GPG: 66F0 CD0A 9EC6 367F C3B4 7EB0 C76D CFBE 86CF 21E4
You can't use it right now because their requests have been multiplicated by 20.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I know everyone is cursing Flash, Javascript and Java but client side UIs are a sensible tool in search result presentation if you want to present something more complex than a list.
...
Whilst Google and others identify and rank results very well, they can't spare the time to do expensive post-processing like partitioning the results. ( It seems that Kartoo can't either can't either. ) 90% of the time what you wanted is on the first page, but sometimes more structure would be useful to dig out the page you actually want. e.g. "get rid of all pages like this one" where there is no obvious "-" term.
A result grouping system on the client side might be more successful. It could get a list of results with summary data from a search or meta-search system (Google's API would be ideal) and could then do any amount of extra work for presentation in a scalable way.
I might give this a go
"Every good boy deserves fudge"
GPG: 66F0 CD0A 9EC6 367F C3B4 7EB0 C76D CFBE 86CF 21E4
Since last night, kartoo's requests have been multiplicated by 20. At this moment, we can't respond to all those requests. We really apologize and we are doing as fast as possible in order to give you the best services. Lets here it for Slashdot!
DISCLAIMER:
I don't believe what I write, and neither should you.
Did not Aple try this years ago in late 1990s?
People did not use it then..what maes anyone think they are going to use it now?
Myeb he was listening to that Apple Fellow , Kay?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Most users think they want results in a graphical form, but usually when presented with the actual display, they dislike them.
One of this days, somebody will find the right way to display search results graphically, but so far all of those that I've seen fell well short of the standard ranked summary list presented by Google.
Get your Unix fortune now!
It's the people who think they need to create a teaser for their site who are creating the problem.
I'm not connvinced that Flash is ever REALLY necessary, but the above is at least 90% of my problem with it.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
Fooled around with it for about 2 hours last night. This is easily the best toolbar plugin I've used yet. Awesome! =D
maybe kat00 and google can get on trading spaces! gay colors and overdesign abound!
Has anyone else noticed that you can not cut and paste into the search-box? If we were ever going to seriously use this, that would be a real draw-back.
No, I don't think it's him. He was all green. And he was only in the Flintstones; though there was that one episode were Fred and Barney wished that they could go to the future and wound up in a distinctly Jetson-esqe era only to be chased back to the past due to a slight miscalculation and a few eons old debt.
Love and Peace,
Valen
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen
This was done two or three years ago (if my memory serves me right) by the Antarcti.ca guys. It was hard to use then and still is.
Cue The Sun...
so why doesn't one or more of you open-source hippy types fix it for them
That site works fine in RC3. I tried the Flash and it worked perfectly. Also the HTML version worked.
How one is supposed to use wget to do some searches and using results some script? Oh well, anti-script-kiddie-feature.
Okay, I tested this out, you're right. You win. I'm a twit.
There's still no need for you to be hostile. I was wrong, but I don't feel that the original post I made deserved such a harsh reaction. (Though I *do* deserve the latest one, hehe)
So can we move on pls?
"Derp de derp."