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
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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."
It seems like it wouldn't be very hard to make a Graphical UI for Google in much the same way that Kart00 does. It's really only a matter of sending a URL request to Google.com and parsing the HTML it sends down to you. Then you can write your own prog that categorizes the data.
That'd be a fun project!
*wishes he had a star-map-like File Explorer for Windows*
"Derp de derp."
Incase anyone was wondering what it looked like, here's a screenshot from one of the help pages: screenshot
- MbM
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.
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
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"...
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.
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."
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.
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."
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."
I don't think it'd take much longer than it takes to get a result from Google. I mean the flash is already loaded, now it just needs to grab the data down from Google. It should do it just as fast as your browser, without having to download the images. The analysis should be quicker than humans can detect, and the graphics should come up reasonably fast.
I have no idea what's wrong with KartOO. There are two possiblities: 1.) they're using a crappy hack to get the data from the search engine (which could be the case if Flash doesn't have a way of getting HTTP data down...) or 2.) Slashdot kicked it's butt.
"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
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.
"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."
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."
(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
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.
A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.
:)
Unless this was written in Flash MX, the data transfer method is complete ass. Massive query string, anyone?
If it is Flash MX, then it's probably some massive hack using Flash MX, ColdFusion MX, JRun, MS SQL Server, and a hampster.
Of course, having the biggest DoS provider on the public Internet hand you your ass doesn't help matters any.
Is this post not nifty? Sluggy Freelance. Worshi
Already done. The software is called VisIT, from the good folks at the University of Illinois, the same campus that has developed a veritable shite load of things for the internet/mac, like Fetch (FTP), and a telnet client.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
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!
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.....
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
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.
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....
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!
Fooled around with it for about 2 hours last night. This is easily the best toolbar plugin I've used yet. Awesome! =D
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."