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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."
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I saw some of the similar kinds of sorting of metadata with stuff from YellowBrix and LingoMotors.
I guess, given my background, I'd be interested to see how this works in the bigger arena and if they'll be doing widescale support of the PRISM and SCORM standards.
Anybody out there get to really play with this on the back end?
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Kartoo.com
Note: Flash required.
Yes we do.
This program, and several similar, allow you to serious organise content. Google is nice on a boolean search, but not for related content type searches.
I'm pretty good at doing searches with Google, but having tried some of this stuff out, it's AMAZING for doing research. A lot of companies are deriving their technology from intelligence agencies.The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Kartoo (previously mentioned here) has been doing visual search results for quite a while already; I'd even say that's the most useful application of Flash that I've ever seen.
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.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Try Google sets, you'll be amazed.
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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.
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
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"
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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...)
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...
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
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.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Allow me to rephrase it (I mean, after all, this is /.! :-D):-
It is now official - SearchEngineWatch has confirmed: Google is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Google community when recently IDC confirmed that the Google accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all search engine usage. Coming on the heels of the latest SearchEngineWatch survey which plainly states that Google has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Google is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive search engine usage test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Google's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Google faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Google because Google is dying. Things are looking very bad for Google. As many of us are already aware, Google continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Google Groups is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core posters.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
The Google CEO Eric Schmidt states that there are 7000 users of Google. How many users of other protocols are there? Let's see. The number of Google versus other search engine hits when you search "search engine" on Google is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 other search engine users. Google posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of other protocols posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Google. A recent article put Usenet at about 80 percent of the Internet market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Google users. This is consistent with the number of Usenet posts about Google on Google.
Due to the troubles of Mountain View, abysmal sales and so on, Google went out of business and was taken over by Slashdot who sell another troubled web service. Now Slashdot is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Google has steadily declined in market share. Google is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Google is to survive at all it will be among search engine hobbyists. Google continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Google is dead.
Fact: Google is dead.
(Credits: This is a revisionist post-modernist /.-aimed humour inspired by an earlier Web is dying troll, which in turn was inspired by earlier "BSD is dying" trolls. And oh, I got the post by googling slashdot for "Kreskin".)
More than mere navel gazing.