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

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.