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

YASE

[DBordello]

(Yet another search engine) Do we really need another one. Google rocks, nuff said.

Re:YASE

[Dave2 Wickham]

Yes, we do. Everyone complains about the monopoly that MS has, but noone seems to care about Google. If Google looses your site now, you are fscked for the time until it gets back in, due to its dominance. True, so my site ranks far better in Google than it does in other SEs, but that's only due to PageRank.

(On an off-topic note, does anyone else have problems with any browser except IE? I've tried konq and Moz (my normal browser) but they don't work...)

Re:YASE

[gl4ss]

when looking for some content on google i find it very annoying that the linkfarm type of mostly generic and sharing most of the pages content(that has no real content anyways) is shared by other pages by the same linkfarm maker..

my solution? i wrote a little app that makes a google search, with googleapi, (say, for mame roms) and then fetches the urls, and scores the pages by a set of rules, like "VOTE ME HERE blabla" gets certain amount of minus points, as do popups, and mame roms names make the score go higher, as do links to ftp and some other 'good' words.

the results i then dump into a db for viewing later.. because it really takes too long to generate on the fly(fetching 300+ urls)

very simple yeah, but works ok actually, after little tweaking(mainly getting enough sample words for to the bad list to get the crapper vote/add/farmlinks sites off.). and pretty good for searching for things that have gazillion crappy pages and few goodone's, and the good urls could be on the 12th page.

what i would like would be a frontend for google that would remove the spammer crapper site's, especially those that _i_ think are spammercrapper.

Knee-jerk anti-Windows response?

[bildstorm]

In my humble experience, I've noted that preview versions of things tend to come out one one platform, and usually the widest available.

Although they're in California, I would have my doubts as to them using solely American programmers. I don't know how various OS support is all around the world, but I do know that when I worked with Israeli companies, they tended to focus heavily on Windows due to the strong Hebrew support on that platform, and a noticeable lack of Hebrew support elsewhere.

Again, it could simply be because building the front-end for the widest range of users was simplest with Windows.

TouchGraph

[elykyllek]

Saw TouchGraph on thescreensavers a while ago, this article just reminded me of it. Basically its a java applet that allows you to search google and look at the relationships graphically, pretty cool.

Rethinking data storage.

[matman]

Check out http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html - it's the future vision whitepaper for ReiserFS. I think that it would be neat for more people to rethink data indexing and metadata strategies at the operating system level. Lets think more about breaking our data into chunks and associating metadata with those chunks. For example, a consider a database stored in a file. Why shouldn't the operating system know about those chunks so that more apps can see them? Why can't I use the same or similar access control mechanisms for those chunks, etc?

Sorry for this kind of off topic post, but the word 'metadata' triggered the memory of that paper. :)

Amazon.com searches rant

[Pyrosophy]

I don't know about anyone else here, but Amazon.com searches frustrate the hell out of me. I can type in the exact title or exact author's name into Amazon's search boxes, check the "Exact spelling" box or whatever it is, and still the thing I'm looking for comes up 8th, behind things that make no sense whatsoever, if it comes up on the first page of searches at all.

Typical example: I want to search for a specific book called Moon Madness, say. So I type it in, get 28,000 results and it's nowhere on the first page. Re-sort, right? Wrong. Amazon only allows you to sort by featured items (?!), A-Z order, Z-A order, or most popular order. And there's no way to skip ahead to halfway through the list on alphabetical order. So you're stuck clicking "next" thousands of times. I've just switched to BN which manages searches MUCH better. If Moon Madness is unpopular or non-featured, which is fairly easy to be, dust off that auto-clicker.

So if this is what Grokker has in store for us, leave me out. If it's just Amazon which limits the search engine's functionality, then Grokker definitely shouldn't be using Amazon as a reference.

Re:Google is going downhill

[Ninja Programmer]

I have my own website, and I monitor how people reach it. And guess what I have found -- above all other methods (excluding their own bookmarks) more people find my site from google, than by any other method.

I put up a page describing some doodling exercises (with a very obscure link in my own website) I have been doing recently, and within 3 days it showed up on google, and has started attracting traffic.

Google is still the best searching technology out there.

Search Engine Evolution...Brilliant Yet Balkanized

[MFInc2001]

I find it amusing that so often, technologically-inclined folks have this sort of "religious" appreciation for Google, as if it is the only search engine technology worthy of regular use or mass consumption. Nothing could be further from the truth. While I will admit that Google is my first (but not only) search engine of choice (and only for certain types of searches), I would like to state my general feelings on the current state of search engine technologies which, I would like to characterize as "brilliant yet balkanized".

Before I do that, and in all fairness to Google, I would like to say that Google's PageRank technology is, for the most part, decent, although certainly not universally-superior.

Google however, has a lot of room for improvement. Some suggestions?

(1) Search Result(s) Clustering

Take a look at Vivisimo.com... They are a company widely recognized for having the most intelligent results-clustering technology.

I find it bizarre that Google often reports to me that there are hundreds of thousands -- sometimes millions -- of results...and yet, gives me the "option" of browsing those results in a top-down linear fashion.

I feel that this is unreasonable. If Google were to CLUSTER results (especially in cases where there are >5000 results), I feel the end user would be much better served.

Google could certainly license Vivisimo.com's clustering technology...or implement their own proprietary form. Either way, I am amazed that Google's results are still not clustered -- even if that clustering was a checkbox option to do so.

It's just not sensible to often report thousands and sometimes millions of results, and then give the user an oversimplified top-down (linear) interface to browse through those results.

(2) "Visual" Search technologies.

I've been a regular user of Kartoo.com for some time now. I find it to be the most well-implemented keyword-connectedness research tool I've ever encountered. SEO-enthusiasts are blessed to have (for now) free access to Kartoo.com. It is also a spectacular implementation of Flash for a purpose other than just "looking slick" and being flashy.

Kartoo allows a person to easily (and very neatly) diagram the keyword commonalities that connect and relate documents on the web.

Unfortunately, the Kartoo interface seems to apply to a limited database. Kartoo functionality on top of Google's database would be ideal, in my opinion.

What am I suggesting? Personally, I would love to see Google buy out or license the Kartoo technology and let users apply it to the Google database. Kartoo really is a very intelligent and useful keyword relevancy diagram tool.

(3) Recursive searching of previous-generation results.

For the longest time, I never knew Google had this ability. Why? Well... after your initial Google search, you only see the "Search within results" link at the BOTTOM of the results list. I feel this option should be available at both the top and bottom of the results list.

(4) Memetic Histography

Take a quick look at HitBrain.com. While far from "perfect", they seem to be doing the best job thus far at keyword frequency tracking. While perhaps "novelty", I think there is real demographics-research value in the following sort of functionality:

Allowing registered users to track relative frequencies of keyword/keyphrase data sets. By this, I mean that a person could, for example, keep an ongoing (daily/weekly/monthly/etc) table of the number of instances of certain search tokens. For example, "john lennon" vs "paul mccartney"...or "microsoft" vs "macintosh"...etc. I think anyone who qualifies as an information age demographer has a use for tracking (over time) relative frequencies of keywords and keyphrases. There is also some entertainment value in seeing how many instances of "good" there are relative to "evil", etc.

(5) ISO search engine syntax standards. I think it would be nice if there was an ISO standard for search engine syntax. I personally prefer Boolean searches to non-Boolean searches (especially when clustering of results is not available). I think that all search engines should accept an ISO syntax standard for searching that, at the very least, allows for advanced Boolean queries, and also, string-proximity-specifying (that is, results for "A" within X number of characters/words from "B", etc) capabilities. Wildcard-capable advanced Boolean and string-proximity-specifying are very useful functions, and would be nice to see ISOfied on all major search engines.

It troubles me that the +" " and -" " syntax doesn't work on all my favourite search engines.

(6) DNS search capabilities.

Take a look at WhoisReport.com (now Whois.sc) and see what it can do for you. I have yet to find a better resource for searching the actual DNS itself.

Some may frown on the searching of the DNS itself but, the truth is, to a respectable degree, the DNS itself has evolved into being a useful directory of sorts. Name Intelligence (the people behind Whois.sc) make their technology available as an API, and Google would be wise to add DNS search capabilities to their WWW search capabilities.

Just my $0.02

Michael Fischer

Re:What's new about this?

[Raiford]

I thought Kartoo was a cool search engine when I first saw it. Then I started to try to understand the legend to the mapping. There really isn't an obvious legend which IMO diminishes the utility of the results. Also the number of relevant hits on Kartoo seems to be consistently less than Google.

SciFi Author Robert A. Heinlein coined "Grok"

[N8F8]

In the 1961 book Stranger in a Strange Land. Quite an achievment to add a word to the English language. It means "To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy. to comprehend.