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When search engines play at maps: visualization technologies.

Article Excerpt
A detailed examination of search engine results is often tedious. It can be difficult, from a results list, to quickly grasp the relevance of the contents of identified pages. That's why most searchers stick to reading the first page of answers!

A few search engines, such as Exalead, with its related terms, related categories, and Web site locations, and Vivisimo, with its clustered results, help searchers decipher results by revealing the major words and expressions appearing frequently in the pertinent pages. That is a really big help, which alone justifies the use of these tools.

Other search engines have chosen different approaches to guide visitors in evaluating search results. Rather than posting a list of results, even embellished with associated terms, these engines present results in graphic form, in order to give the results enhanced meaning. The search engines hope the maps will help users recognize and discover patterns, concepts, or similarities in information that will help them select a page to look at or refine their search strategy.

The French metasearch engine KartOO [www.kartoo.com], launched in 2001, posts results in the shape of maps of page icons, in which the found sites are represented by pages sized according to their relevance. Related words and expressions appear both graphically and as words in a column to the left of the screen. These can help searchers refine the request. KartOO recently announced the addition of Entireweb, a Swedish search engine, to the 14 engines it already searches. But KartOO isn't the only search engine experimenting with visual displays of search results.

I GROK, YOU GROK, WE GROK

The California company Groxis [www.groxis.com] developed, at the end of 2003, fee-based software called myGrokker that lets users chart the results of different search...