Kartoo Search Engine Presents Results as a Map 279
cdupree writes "I've just run across a search engine called Kartoo---anyone else know it? Apparently it's been up since April 25. It presents its results in a graphical fashion, sort of like a map, allowing you to refine your query interactively. Admittedly, the "working" picture is a bit dorky, but the site is not dripping with ads (except for itself), and it's interesting to see the connections it finds when you enter, for example, "slashdot." My initial take on the thing is, it looks pretty, it presents the standard information in a new and different manner, but I haven't used it enough to get much in-depth knowledge of how best to use it. Has anyone had experience with this method of presenting search results? Is there background available on the folks who produced it beyond the trivial amount on the web site?" This sounds like a plug, but the few searches I tried with this engine to my surprise turned up interesting, relevant results. Update: 05/28 14:29 GMT by T : Laurent Baleydier adds: "Since last night, kartoo's requests have been multiplied by 20. At this moment, we can't respond to all those
requests. We really apologize and we are doing as fast as possible in order to give you the best services."
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:2, Interesting)
Relevant Results? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe that's because it gets its results from Google? Try a search for "nanotechnology" in Kartoo and Google, you will find the results are exactly the same.
Now Kartoo admits they are a "meta search engine", so the real question here is: is this map thing actually useful? And is it worth the 12 seconds it took to make that map? In my small amount of experimentation, I would say its nifty, but not terribly useful, and its slower than molasses.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon [stumbleupon.com]
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:3, Interesting)
That'd be a fun project!
*wishes he had a star-map-like File Explorer for Windows*
Re:Relevant Results? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, I searched for my nickname and found the results kind of interesting. Not really anything to write home about, but I got to go down a lot of different paths. The map was the same time every time I entered my nick, so if I were to come back to it tomorrow, I'd remember which area of the map I was on and try a different one.
If you're looking for a few fan sites on the Transformers, for example, I can see the visual metaphor being quite useful compared to Google's "we'll list them in order." technique.
Not sure if that makes a whole lot of sense or not, but I'm starting to get the idea how a visual cue like this could be quite constructive in hunting down hard-to-find info.
Some experience (Score:4, Interesting)
It was pretty interesting, the program was similar to the interface to Chime for chemistry, you could zoom in and out and rotate the link structure. I'm not sure what the result of the research was, and I'd say it was a toss up as to whether it was easier to use or not.
Maybe the CS grad student that did the research reads slashdot and he can tell us how it turned out.
Generating Images (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure if you put in enough effort you could draw pictures [nfrance.com]
of course slash-code f's with the URL so here's an smlnk: (ps. smlnk.com shortens URLs mostly for usenet or irc postings so don't be freaked out be the redirect)
http://smlnk.com/?EPRZ4J7R [smlnk.com]
Interesting results... (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people have been complaining about the slow response compared to google, and so on. Well let's not worry about that right now, let's look at what it does do interesting.
Google is used for very specific searches, and Kartoo doesn't really change that. Instead, I used Kartoo to do a general search. I typed in "Robocop'. Here is the link:
http://www.kartoo.com/kartoo2/servlet/H?q=robocop
Notice it shows a few sites, and even a few words giving you hints about what the site is about. I think this is where some people had some trouble, though. This page is full of javascripts and style sheets, so I can imagine anybody not running IE 5 is going to have trouble. (Sorry!)
It's pretty cool that at a glance I know what that site is going to show me before I actually read it's description when I move my mouse over it. Right away, without having to read much at all, I knew that I could find pictures of Robocop, information about the movies, and even a hint that there was a series to Robocop.
This is where the speed comes. Google is fast and all, but I've never found info this fast on a general topic such as "Robocop".
Go try it out! You'll see what I mean. I don't know if this particular site will become popular, but I do think that it proves that the graphical search enging concept is viable and interesting. I'd still use Google for very specific questions I have, but if I wanted to know about general topics, this would be a very handy place to look
Re:Fun, but no Google (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no idea what's wrong with KartOO. There are two possiblities: 1.) they're using a crappy hack to get the data from the search engine (which could be the case if Flash doesn't have a way of getting HTTP data down...) or 2.) Slashdot kicked it's butt.
Re:Pretty Neat (Score:5, Interesting)
Had a good play a few days ago (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd been waiting for somebody to try something genuinely useful with Flash for a while, at least useful beyond providing something to hide behind when you haven't got any real content, and while Kartoo is nice enough to now be near the top of my five miles of mostly unsorted bookmarks, one side of me wishes that they'd waited for SVG to be a bit more available.
Maybe I was lucky in my first choice, but I opted for "complexity nonlinear emergence" and was richly rewarded. The visual presentation of results and associated keywords seemed like a significant step forward and led me to a bunch of useful cross disciplinary sites that I haven't had a chance to more than skim yet.
It has been interesting to compare Kartoo with Google Sets [slashdot.org] that was discussed here last week. Both are novel approaches to situating search items in context, but at least for "complexity nonlinear emergence" Google Sets is singularly unhelpful.
Dynamic clustering ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the first full web search tool to display results using dynamic clustering ?
I only had a brief play with the non-clustering version prior to
and thought it summarised the options very well. The speed wasn't great but not too bad either for the work I think it was doing. If they can work on scalability a bit more perhaps they'll have something.
A while ago I implemented a dynamic clustering search/refine system based on a Xerox PARC idea called "Scatter-Gather". Potentially, it gives good results, but since clustering is naturally
an O(n^2) operation, you need to find shortcuts to make it quick enough.
Clustering is finding groups of documents in a collection which interrelate more to each other than to the other documents. e.g. the results for "chocolate cake" would hopefully partition into cake recipes, cake shops, cake mix, diet tips, chocolate appreciation societies etc etc..
From what I've seen, my guess is that with clustering off (the default) it's doing some sort of pseudo-clustering a bit like this:
* Starts with an indexing search engine's results.
* Re-indexes these or their summaries, binning the usual stop words like pronouns and weighting by frequency in the sub-collection.
* Picks some distinctive/distant vectors, i.e
documents which contain few overlaps with each other.( picking a few samples O(nlogn) ? )
* Labels them with their distinctive terms and displays.
* Allows the initial "Google" search to be refined +/- these terms.
With clustering on, I'd guess the main differences to be in the document sampling and query refinement. I'll take another look in a couple of days time. Has anyone tried it out ?
Clustering is expensive, but I still think it's a useful tool for presenting and refining results. This is the best example I've seen so far. The graphical presentation feels fairly natural and intuitive.
It would be a nice option to have on Google to say "cluster my results", when you notice there are distinct classes of result you want to isolate. I'd wait 30s for that.
Colin