Grokker Search Engine Provides Visual Search Results

KeatonMill writes "The New York Times (as always, free registration) ran this article about a new search engine, called Grokker, created by a company called Groxis. Grokker builds a map of content catagories using metadata. So far, it is used in the Amazon.com online catalog and the Northern Light search engine. Groxis is also developing a version to use to search your own computer."

Comments

Ouch

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

System Req's:

Windows 2000, XP (for non-English locale Windows 2000 or XP)
Pentium III at 400MHZ or higher.
128MB RAM (256MB preferred)
100MB of free disk space without preloaded Java (with preloaded Java 20MB of free disk space).

How do they ever expect this to truly catch on everywhere? Google is all you need, and it works great on a 386 with Lynx.

This is just more useless attempts at eye candy programs from another dot-bomb company; move along, folks.

Metadata

[King of the World]

Searching using metadata? Are they just name-dropping terms? What metadata is it? If it's just gathered from a page then it's meta description and keywords. I mean, Northern Light doesn't search for Dublin Core metadata does it?

More competition? Glad to hear it.

[AllTom]

I'm a firm believer in Google and all, but I think that there are always new things that another search engine could provide that would make me switch. I think some of the things that made Google so big are that their pages load fast, the search results are so simple, and commercialism doesn't affect the search results themselves. If another engine can match this, I'm sure that they'll go far, even if not as far as Google has. Besides, if anything it will give Google something to worry about so that they'll work even harder at securing their position as the best. ;)

Re:YASE

[mr_exit]

Do we really need another one. Google rocks, nuff said.

Yes we do, competition is a good thing, having many search engines battleing for our serch clicks is what keeps them free and what keeps them getting better.....

slashdot is a funny beast, people jeer the monopolies and people still jeer at a small upstart trying to take on the big boys.

The difference

[jukal]

This must be taken out of context, but...

Mr. Decombe argues that Grokker is a more universal approach to the problem of visualizing textual information than what has been found in previous tools, which focus more on navigation than on categorization.

"The difference is that we have no single paradigm"

...which is exactly why things like this have failed before IMHO. Being to complicated too run, administrate, use and understand. Or... I hope this provocates some wiser to explain why it groks?

Google is going downhill

[anotherone]

I know that we all love Google for searching, but I'm hereby predicting that (unless trends change) it may fall from favor.

A search engine should be impartial- if you search for something, it should give you the site that best matches what you're searching for, not the site that best matches what the owner's opinions are.

Just recently, they removed several thousand websites from their index for unclear reasons- I first noticed this when a search for "somethingawful" failed to bring up anything on the http://www.somethingawful.com/ domain, like one would speculate that it should. I'm sure we all remember a few months ago when Google removed anti-scientology websites from their index and refused to sell advertising to anti-sci sites and services. Something Awful, which I'm sure most people here are at least aware of (if not avid readers like myself) has in the past published several anti-scientologist articles.

A quick glance of the google public support newsgroup shows that SA might not be the only site that's recently been removed. Some people are claiming that google has recently removed dozens of Christian websites. It could be a fluke, but it seems to me like perhaps Google has fallen to outside political influence. I for one will welcome new search engines, if for no other reason than to loosen google's monopoly on internet searches.

Re:Google is going downhill

[rgmoore]

Unfortunately, pressure from the outside is a consequence of Google's influence, and would likely wind up applying to any search engine that reaches Google's caliber. They're internationally significant, so any entity that wants to shut down opposing points of view is likely to target them. (Google may have some additional problems here because they cache the sites and make them available, making them a source of the information directly as well as indirectly.) Unfortunately, being globally significant also means that Google has to obey a lot of different laws in various jurisdictions. That means that they can be legally forced to de-list some sites- Holocaust denial sites in Germany, places selling Nazi memorabilia in France, sites that are alleged to violate copyright in the U.S., or even anything the government disapproves of in some more repressive countries. If you have a suggestion for how they can continue listing everything in spite of the legal restrictions on doing so, I'm sure that Google would be very interested in knowing about it.

Predictions

[thasmudyan]

I'm sure a lot of us know that this WILL NOT catch on. Maybe its all that bad dot-bomb experience that induces negative thinking - but what the hell is this thing going to give me that a text-based system won't? I used it and found it very tiring to use. Turns out that nicey grafx is not always the best choice to present information fast and precise.

There are of course other reasons for that:

- NO WAY that many users will install this monster on their machines (if it doesn't come with Windows or a Linux distro most people won't bother even if they got broadband).

- Often you just want to do a simple keyword search, that's how the brain works most of the time, so the graphical relationship explorer thingy is not needed in most instances - and yet on occasions when it is needed it takes far to much (human) processing power to work with in a quick manner.

Besides i found the tool to be somewhat of a context/paradigm breach that isn't well suited for ease of use nor "professional" search work.

Re:Predictions

[NeMon'ess]

On my computer, it would be cool if I could see search results in three dimentions. When I search for 'Lover' wanting a particular song, I don't care about my porn containing that word. So once the results come up I sort by folder. What would make this faster is if I could sort by folder in one dimention, and file size in another.

For web searches, it would be cool if I could search for 'Katie Holmes' and get my results grouped, possibly in 3D, keeping the porno sites separate from the sites offering information. Sure I could enter more keywords, but that isn't always possible.

The perfect example is when I hear a line or two from a song, but the lines are so general, that even using quotation marks still returns unrelated links. I'd like results grouped into categories so I can look at the 'lyrics' or 'song' listings.

Yaaaawnnnn

[Alomex]

People have been presenting graphic search engines since 1995 (look up the WWW conference, for example). To this date, none of them have succeeded.

For all graph visualizers out there: no one cares that you can draw a nifty little graph with arrows as links (duh!). The question is: is the information associated with those links best grasped visually?

The page ranking algorithm from Google uses link information to compute the ranking of the result set. It is unclear how a collection of lines in a blank page will enhance the fact that the top reference is, ahem, the top reference...