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."

Comments

Porn?

[shermon]

A search for "porn" took 20 seconds... I don't think this search engine is up to snuff for the internet. :)

Re:Porn?

[NanoGator]

Really? Right away I had a midget wearing cherries as earrings pop right up.

An incredibly obnoxious search engine.

[Sivar]

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

My results

[pjdepasq]

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.

inevitable slashdotting....

[Anthony Boyd]

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.

it's a meta crawler, not an indexer...

[BluSkreen]

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.

Relevant Results?

[geoffsmith]

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

Re:Relevant Results?

[NanoGator]

I'm not sure they intended this to replace Google. I think this is meant to be a different tool, not a replacement tool. I think it's more useful as a "How proliferated is this info on the web?" request rather than a "What exactly is a zif-socket?" request.

For example, I searched for my nickname and found the results kind of interesting. Not really anything to write home about, but I got to go down a lot of different paths. The map was the same time every time I entered my nick, so if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I'd remember which area of the map I was on and try a different one.

If you're looking for a few fan sites on the Transformers, for example, I can see the visual metaphor being quite useful compared to Google's "we'll list them in order." technique.

Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense or not, but I'm starting to get the idea how a visual cue like this could be quite constructive in hunting down hard-to-find info.

Mirror

[Triskaidekaphobia]

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.

DMCA

[hhg]

Try a search for "Fuckhead", and see a fine map of Capitol Hill emerging.

Re:Flash?

[NanoGator]

"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.

Some experience

[GigsVT]

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.

Generating Images

[fliplap]

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

Interesting results...

[NanoGator]

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.

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& l=1&s=0&lp=1

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

Re:Pretty Neat

[sparcv9]

I really hope that somebody'll develop a file browser for Windows kind of like this. I think I'd work a hell of a lot faster if my hard drive looked like a star-map instead of climbing a tree.

Someone already has developed a star-map file browser -- for UNIX. Check out XCruise. Sadly, it doesn't seem to have been updated since sometime in 2000, but it runs flawlessly for me.

Dynamic clustering ?

[cjstephen]

Has anyone had a chance to try the clustering option ?
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 /.ing (using "chocolate cake")
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